Where I post all my ITP related stuff.
Last night, in my Applications class, we had 3 grads of ITP discuss their experience with entrepreneurship and working together. At one point, they discussed financials and working together. They listed several personality traits that apparently investors look for…I found this useful and inspiring.
integrity
passion
experience
knowledge
skill
leadership
commitment
vision
coachability
fearless
For my Physical Computing midterm, I worked with Andrea Wolf and Sindy Butz to create a balance board that controls a video in Processing.
Here’s a video of me demonstrating for our class.
Balance Board Media Controller from Allison Walker on Vimeo.
The way it works: User steps on the board, which completes a switch inside the board. An accelerometer inside the board reports back to Processing which way the user is leaning. Right – fast forward. Left – slow down. Tilt forward – screen gets darker. Tilt backward – screen lightens.
Here are some photos of us during prototyping stage and assembly. Here’s a slideshow on Flickr.
This week, my group finally presented for Red Burns’ Applications of Interactive Telecommunications. My group consisted of Chris Allick, Hana Newman, and Andy Jordan. Together, we successfully worked together to produce a presentation on our reaction to Craig Newmark’s talk the previous week. Not only did the class enjoy our presentation, we also enjoyed and didn’t feel like we were imposing on the other students at all.
Here’s the PowerPoint/Keynote presentation that describes our process.
What we ended up doing was coming up with a compliment for each of our 108 other classmates, plus our instructors. Everyone left feeling much better about themselves. What we thought was great about this activity was that thinking nice things about other people cannot help but lead to a better community, and Craigslist and Craig Newmark are all about building community. Many people have said that they really enjoyed our presentation. So, nice job us.
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After that, we had our guest speaker’s presentation. This week our discussion was on Assistive Technologies. In my experience, I spent 4 years in a school that incorporated students with relatively severe physical handicaps, some to the point where they could not speak. And, my step-brother has some cognitive impairments.
Overall, my impressions of Assistive Technology were a). There’s a lot of focus on physical impairments. What about cognitive disabilities?; and b). Is the motivation more to help people keep up with other people, or is it to just have a decent quality of life? I don’t know…. I think about my brother a lot while I’m here. I want him to have a fun childhood, because you only get one. I feel like there must be something I can do to help him not only keep up with his peers, or do things they cannot, but also to just have a decent quality of life.
They may not make much sense, because I was just jotting down notes, but my comments on the speech were the following:
In this lab, I was only confused by one part of instructions, which refers to the jumper on the Arduino. The model I have doesn’t have a jumper on it, so I at first I thought I was stuck. But, a resident came over to help and explained that my model does the switching from EXT, drawing from external power, to USB automatically.
Well, I still finished the lab…sort of. I have an issue described in the code, where my LED blinks 3 times, and then blinks once, then repeats. Also, my motor doesn’t really turn off completely when I click the switch and use the pot. It actually slows down a lot, then sort of stops, then jumps before starting all over again. This behavior is coordinated with the triple-blinking LED, which should not be blinking 3 times repeatedly like that, in a cycle. Apparently, it’s caused by something resetting itself. I’ll have to check into this and see if I can fix the problem.
….
Later on I tried my connections again, and I’m still not sure what the problem could be. I don’t understand how to reduce the amount of voltage going to the motor, so I’m not sure how to not have this problem. In any case, I took more photos. Maybe my wiring is wrong?
Yes, it’s exciting. We’re making stuff move. Sort of.
So, I made a little video about my experience with the DC motor lab, which you can watch right now or keep reading while I tell you something about it first.
Initially, I had some trouble figuring out how to get the breadboard set up correctly. I noticed that the diagram uses a 9V pin on the Arduino, which my Arduino doesn’t have. So, I hooked up one end of my wire to the second ground pin, assuming that the photo was not correct. Then, I put the other end of the wire into the breadboard, across from the power on the DC motor, assuming that that’s what was correct.
Well, I was wrong about something because the above wasn’t working. So I tried to simply light up an LED just to make sure my wires were correct. The LED came on, so I figured I was right about something and just started doubting the diagram again. Eventually, someone suggested I plug the power directly into the breadboard – of course, since coming from ground, it wouldn’t make sense anyway – and then the motor came on.
After that, I worked on the next part of the lab, using the potentiometer to adjust the motor. I got that part to work too. Pretty cool. I’m not so good with gears, yet, which is why I’m trying to adjust the rotating bar.
Last week we discussed ideas for our midterm and I presented something I’d been thinking about since Week 4. My idea was to create a calculator that doesn’t work…or works more like a Magic 8 Ball than a calculator. It actually does add and subtract but what you get are strings, not numbers.
When I started working on it, I was going crazy trying to figure out how to create a class for every property that a button would have – rollover detection, button press detection, the value of each button, and how to store the value of each button so that you could actually do a calculation. Then, it was suggested that I use a library to create the buttons. (Duh.) I chose ControlP5. Admittedly, using the library was a revelation and it helped me progress my work forward by at least a week. I think I would have lost it if I had to create an entire button class in a week, and figure out how to make the rest of the calculator work.
So after all that, I again got help adding the buttons and creating the first of 2 switch statements to determine button press. The second, I made on my own. But, eventually I was able to do a lot of work alone, creating the array of strings, calling the functions to print the strings, creating outlines for the buttons, and adding the ability to subtract. I also added buttons to the calculator that have nothing to do with math at all. Like a ‘Q’ button, an ‘&’ button, and a ‘?’ button. I may create put in other mathematical operators, ‘*’ and ‘/’ so that it seems more like a true calculator…we’ll see.
I am disappointed that the ControlP5 library doesn’t have much in the way of customization of the buttons. The text is really tiny and I’d prefer to make it look more calculator-like. Eventually, maybe I will end up creating a button class and then be able to modify the look a little bit better. For now, I’m happy that I have a calculator that (mostly) works.
If you use it, remember that it can only add or subtract two numbers. If you do a compound calculation, like ‘N + Y – R & S’, you’ll get results from the last operator used, in this example ‘&’. It also works best if you ‘Clear’ your results after each calculation.
