Mike D. @ ITP

Okay, actually, it didn’t quite work out like that at all, but here is the almost-a-week-overdue story of how I was tasked to make an improv project for my Networked Objects class (which involved monkeys, pudding, lentils, cups, etc), how it all kinda worked, and then how it all mostly sucked in the end.

I started out with a simple concept: we were tasked to make a project in one week that had to interact with the user. It had to use one or more from a list of verbs (including blowing, tapping, pushing, etc), a list of random objects (the aforementioned monkeys, pudding, lentils, cups, and playground balls), and must produce a reaction (including sound, light, movement, etc).

I started out with a computer fan, a big cup (stolen from my kitchen), a bag of lentils (thank you Adam Simon!) and a piezo attached to my arduino. However, after a few hours of playing around with various setups (and hot glue, foamcore, and a few other helping items), it became clear that it just wasn’t going to work out, and thus the concept was abandoned.

So, since I fortunately have a huge freaking pile of white LED’s from last semester, I wired up three of them, and plugged them through a cup from the water station. The original plan had been to wire fiberoptics through the bottom, however they were being cantankerous and at this point time was of the essence. Once they were set, I stuck a piezo to the edge of the cup, and hooked it all up to an arduino mini. The plan was that if you flicked the cup, the lights would blink.

What I ended up with was this: a cup of lentils with lights… except the lights went off constantly. Somewhere on the trip back from Jersey City (or perhaps just due to the insanity that is the ITP floor), the piezo just stopped behaving properly, and when it was time to present, my “interactive” concept wasn’t interactive at all — it didn’t require user input for anything.

So, in short, it didn’t quite work out as planned, but the original concept, I still think, would have been great. I’ll be honest, I hope I get an excuse to build that again later on.

Having spent the entire second half of the semester focused on one single project for Physical Computing, it’s very difficult to take a few steps back and try to recap the entire experience. However, as that’s pretty much the whole point of presenting to an audience, let’s give this a try, shall we?

[more after the jump]

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Perfy perfy, by doryexmachina.

Huzzah! The Mini and the USB plug have been perfboard’d!!

DSCN5353, by doryexmachina.

More pictures here.

Movies of said tree:

So i finally un-screwed my code and got the tri-color LED talking to Processing, which is right now telling it to change color every so often. This is very good. Right now it’s just pretty, the next step is bring the weather parser back and have it send color changes, but that’s nearly done as well. And then, the actual tree…

But seen above is the shot of that one tri-color shining through the fiberoptic strands I might use. Or ones like these, anyway — these particular ones were broken off the end of a crappy pen from Staples. Yay for gaudy office supplies!

Movie of the LED on its own here: [ clicky ]

So I emptied out all my junk drawers/bins/shelves at my apartment, and found that all the shit I’d been hoarding for years may finally come in handy. Broken printer? Motors! Cables? Wires!

Also found an old soldering iron and a few usb/firewire/serial cables that I’m sure I can make use of.

Less to buy = huzzah, at this point.

…and now, after cleaning and recovering from the night spent talking to folks in Andy’s elevator, I am tired. Time for beer and … pComp final work. Sigh.

Okay, so my to-do list for pComp doesn’t look too horrible right now:

I’ve started to get this tree thing off the ground, first with a sketch:

Which is based largely on these two tree ideas:

[gem tree] and [wire bonsai]

Well, it looks pretty in code anyway.

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She works! My lil’ mini withstood its first (and second) test of blinky lighting, thanks to the diagram Arduino.cc put up and Jane Oh’s neato how-to.

Top-down view (notes on Flickr page):

It’s pretty much the exact same as Jane’s setup, but yellow is RX, blue is TX, the upper red and black are power and ground for the arduino, the bottom black and red are power to the board. The other red wire to the chip (and black on the board) are the reset switch. I forgot to switch ports (and switch to 168) initially, but after that, worked like a charm!

And MINI!

So people like trees, it seems.

I’d spent this week observing trees, spaces without trees, and people’s opinions of trees. The latter actually proved the most fruitful, with
What I’d like to do is create something like this:

or

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