Starting to design a calm tuner

I’m starting to work on a prototype for this idea of a “tuner” that finds calm.

I had prompted Claude to sketch with things that I already own, a design.

I have some items waiting to be ordered in a cart from Adafruit: Softpot, Neopixel, etc.\

From Claude:

You can test the whole interaction today with basic kit parts and the OLED you already have. tuner_lite.ino is written for this setup.

Wiring

Part	Connect to	Stands in for
Potentiometer	Outer pins → 5V and GND, middle → A0	SoftPot
LED + 220–330Ω resistor	D5 → resistor → LED long leg; short leg → GND	NeoPixel
OLED	SDA → A4, SCL → A5, VCC → 5V, GND → GND	Extra: shows static vs. signal
Piezo buzzer (optional)	D9 → buzzer +, buzzer – → GND	Vibration motor

What it does

Turning between stations, the LED flickers, the OLED fills with scattered dots, and the buzzer crackles softly like radio static.
Landing on a station slowly, the static clears. The LED breathes, a circle on the OLED grows and shrinks with the breath, and the buzzer goes quiet.
Turning fast keeps everything in static, so the “you can’t scroll your way to calm” idea is already testable.

Before uploading

Install Adafruit SSD1306 and Adafruit GFX from the Library Manager.
If your OLED is 128×32, change OLED_HEIGHT to 32. If the Serial Monitor says “OLED not found,” try address 0x3D.
No buzzer? Set USE_BUZZER to false. No OLED? Set USE_OLED to false; the LED alone still shows the interaction.

When the SoftPot, NeoPixel, and motors arrive, switch to tuner.ino. The station and speed logic is the same, so anything you tune here carries over.