Intro to Physical Computing: Final Project…Rejects

How did I come to my final idea. Well, I rejected many other ideas first. For instance…

UV-Sunlight Watch: I thought I’d try to make one of my fantasy devices. A UV-Sunlight watch that helps you get a good amount of daily sunlight. However, after some research, and learning that UV calculators really do exist, I was a little put off by the idea. A sunlight detection watch is useful, but I wanted to try something original and something that I would like. (Not to say that the idea of a plant that responds is completely original….)
UV-Sunlight watch

Interactive Floor: I thought about some kind of sidewalk/responsive floor. This came from the knowledge I’d gained in making a switch for the balance board, media controller. I considered a few options for this: the Moonwalk sidewalk, a child’s play area, etc. After I while, I thought that while it could be very colorful and fun, I wanted to try something a little bit more substantive.interactive floor

Others: I thought about a never-ending puzzle that would use an accelerometer to control a ball’s descent through a visual maze. Seemed really difficult.
maze


Also, I didn’t properly document it, but I thought about a portable photo booth. I got this idea from a rectangle that had been left in the junk bin and reminded me of a frame. I thought about walking around and seeing the world in photographs. How would this work? Well, my idea was that you would carry a frame on your shoulders and people could take photos with you if they wanted in your photo booth. I did not go with this idea out of fear of the expense of potentially additional camera equipment.

Light-Piano: This idea was to create a grid of LEDs and photocells that, after reaching a certain threshold, would trigger a sound.
LED Piano1


The sounds I wanted would correlate to a musical scale, so essentially you could play a grid of LEDs. I kind of went with this for a while. I thought it would look pretty and you could put it on a wall. I sort of wanted it to look like this, but cost MUCH less.

I talked about these ideas to other students and they appreciated all of my ideas, and they came up with suggestions for me as well. But, something about the idea seemed…oh, unspecific. Like the project was not thoughtful enough. Eventually, as I thought about sensors and realizing that I could use a much smaller grid, with my own sounds, somehow the idea of sighing came to me. Possibly because I was sitting by a window and there was a small plant nearby.

Well, I’ve talked to my fellow students again, about my new idea and they all like it, too. This time however, when I say, “The plant will sigh, like it’s happy to see you, when you come close to it,” they say, “Awwww….” Cute.

Intro to Physical Computing: Final Project Proposal

This was meant to be a continuing post about my final project for Physical Computing, however I’ve finally decided on a project. I’m not sure what I’ll title it, but Android Pet Plant sort of comes to mind.

My Android Pet Plant will (hopefully) do 3 things: When you first encounter it, you can come close. It will respond with a human voice that sighs. When you touch it, it will respond by vibrating gently. And when you leave – the part that seems really difficult – it will whimper like a sad puppy.
Android Pet Plant

Phys Comp Midterm: Balance board video controller

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.

Week 8: Phys Comp – H Bridge


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.

Auto Power Jumper

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?

Week 8: Phys Comp – DC MotorS!

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.

Phys Comp – Week 6: Serial Communication, Part 2

Working with an accelerometer for serial communication
Working with an accelerometer for serial communication


For our second lab exercise with Serial Communication (which I’m doing early because it seems fun), I got to use an accelerometer for the first time. (Borrowed temporarily from another student.)

In the first half of the lab, I was able to get the ball to move around, and added the smooth(); command to Processing to make the edges of the ellipse to smooth out.

In the second half, I had trouble. I actually couldn’t get the call and response connection to work. I’m not sure what happened. I got the hello as we’d programmed from the Arduino, but as soon as I picked up the breadboard and got input from the accelerometer, the serial monitor seemed like it wasn’t sure if it should be outputting bytes or ASCII and put out both numbers and letters that sometimes made sense as words(?).

I’m not sure what the issue was, but hopefully we’ll go over this in class. I’ll raise my hand and ask, for sure.