Recitation 4 Drawing Machine by Roger
Explore the stepper motor
It is very easy to connect the circuit since we are very familiar with these things now. This is one thing we need to pay more attention: sometimes the circuit might have bad contacts. We had to spend a lot of time to figure out what’s wrong with that.
Another problem was that the stepper motor tended to rotate in a very slow spend when we adjusted the potentiometer. The reaction of stepper motor was too slow to let people control it. One of the assistants told us to map the input data from the potentiometer into a proper range for the stepper motor. After we adjusted this, how much we rotated the potentiometer would cause how much the stepper motor rotated. This is how the stepper motor work after adjusting the code.
Malika and I connected the stepper motors and the some plastic legs to prepare them for the drawing. But we found that, using potentiometer was a difficult way to control the pen. If we want make the pen go straight, then we need a very complex calculation. So I think this system was fun but not very useful
Questions
Question 1
I want to build a machine that can help me get up in every morning. Sometimes I am very lazy and do not want to get up early in the morning. I know it is not good but sometimes even the alarm clocks cannot wake me up. So I want to build a machine which can push me to get up: using motors to change the angle of my bed so that I cannot lie down on my bed anymore. If possible, we can set up some function like even if I get up but once I lie down on the bed again in the morning, the same system will be trigger again.
Question 2
I realized that human’s reaction and feedback is the core of all our project from The Drumming and Drawing Subhuman. This project is about the project want to play drums like human-beings. Our project is some how similar to that because our project want to act as a human to draw, even if we need to give inputs by ourselves. Maybe with some technologies, machine itself can gain input from the outside world. It is also similar to choose actuators since we need to know how human works and try to imitate human-beings.