Spin the house

Housing is one of the five big challenges. Skellefteå needs a lot of new homes, fast, and they have to last.

So the house is a toy. Spin it one way and the facade on the screen builds itself in warm light. Spin it the other way, cold blue. Fast, slow, stop: the building follows your hands.

1. Four magnets sit in the base of the house. Two hall sensors read them as it turns, eight steps per turn.
2. An ESP32 works out direction and speed ten times a second, and sends them over MQTT.
3. TouchDesigner grows a generative apartment facade from it. The room’s light turns amber or blue with the direction.

• Direction comes from a leaky integrator, and a momentum lock stops it flipping while the house is still spinning fast.
• Field logs showed gaps of almost a second inside a single spin, so “stopped” was tuned from two seconds down to 0.8.
• One sensor chattered in the field and was moved to another pin.
• Over-the-air updates, a watchdog and a remote reboot keep it running without anyone opening the house.