This week, I spent some time cutting and gathering branches for the wall, then weaving them together out in the yard. I only got enough branches to make a single panel because I underestimated the number of boughs I would need, but I’m thinking I might end up just making one of these pieces instead of 2 (meaning a 6 foot installation rather than a 12 foot one.)

Here’s the branches woven together:

I still need to paint everything, which I’m worried will get messed up because of the weather.

In one nice development, a friend has offered to give me some IR sensors that he made for a different project, so I don’t need to buy 100 bucks worth of sensors now- nice! I’m not sure how well they’ll work, but he said they can read up to 18 inches away, which I think will be fine.

They look like this:

he also sent me a pretty terrible photo of the schematic for them, included for reference:

They look to use a simple IR emitter and receiver, with a pulldown resistor in between- that way, voltage only goes through when the receiver is getting IR signal. Pretty cool!