Author: Leon (Linhui Wu lw2397)

Lab Date: Mar. 15, 2019
Instructor: Marcela
Lab Partner: Alex 

Materials: 

1 * 42STH33-0404AC stepper motor 1 * SN754410NE ic chip 1 * power jack  1 * 12 VDC power supply  1 * Arduino kit and its contents 2 * Laser-cut short arms
2 * Laser-cut long arms  1* Laser-cut motor holder  2 * 3D printed motor coupling  5 * Paper Fasteners 1 * Pen that fits the laser-cut mechanisms, Paper

Step  1

In step one, it requires me to build up the circuit with the H-bridge. I pay more attention to how to identify the IC. To locate this IC’s front and pinout, look for a semicircle at its end. This semicircle indicates where the front of the IC is. The pin to the left is pin 1.  

I pay a little bit more time on step one because the first step is the most important. It has burning potential if the circuit is wrong.  I forget to upload the code for the first time and Marcela mentions that. After uploading the code, it rotates automatically.  

Step 2

I add one potentiometer to my circuit and I try to upload the code but I found it failed, and I checked again and found I haven’t use map function correctly. It should be following the int and be written as “map (Val, 0, 1023, 0, 200). I forget a lot and read the reference of map function again. However, when I have uploaded, the motor can still rotate automatically and the potentiometer cannot control the motor totally. I ask Young for help, then he asked to use 12 VDC power supply because the motor needs high voltage.

Step 3

After that, I build up a drawing machine with my partner. But I found potentiometer can control but it cannot control totally. Marcela told me I cannot rotate the potentiometer so fastly.

Q1: What kind of machines would you be interested in building? Add a reflection about the use of actuators, the digital manipulation of art, and the creative process to your blog post.

I am interested in building a machine which is practical to solve real-life problems and improve people’s lives and has a fancy appearance at the same time. For example, I want to build up a cup hat which has a hidden fan. The fan will rotate to make you feel cool when you press the button. And the fan also can bring hot-gas when you feel cold. 

“An actuator is a component of a machine that is responsible for moving and controlling a mechanism or system, for example by opening a valve. In simple terms, it is a “mover”. An actuator requires a control signal and a source of energy.” I can see many actuators in life, for example, the door. The actuator can control the rotation of the door. The actuator also can be the motor in the drawing machine which controls the pen rotate. 

When we talk about art, many people will think about studio art like painting and architecture, those physical things immediately. Digital manipulation gives more possibility to art in terms of how to create artworks. Digital manipulation combines technology and art. It gives us more visual and using experience. Simultaneously, digital manipulation makes more normal people access to art and realize their creative ideas. 

In my opinion, the creative process is an enjoyable and improving process, where people can build up the connections between imagination and the physical world, and create amazing artworks. At the same time, it is a learning process because you will find some challenges and difficulties and you might also get new inspirations. In different industries, the forms or steps of the creative process is different. A novel writer comes up with an idea and writing, then revise and polish language,  A director designs the picture, shoot and then organize and edit. They are all creative process. The similarity is that they all according to a certain framework. Ideas, Creation, Revising, Reflection, and Report. The details might change because of different people in different areas. The generous framework makes us understand more and create more. 

Q2: Choose an art installation mentioned in the reading ART + Science NOW, Stephen Wilson (Kinetics chapter). Post your thoughts about it and make a comparison with the work you did during this recitation. How do you think that the artist selected those specific actuators for his project? 

 I am really impressed by stelarc’s exoskeleton in 2003, he created a pneumatically six-legged device to activate human’s muscle power. It can be used to increase the walking speed of people and carry heavy loads. I think it has the same principle as what we have done.  Because they are both increasing the “power” of the human. The drawing machine can help people to draw some things while the exoskeleton equipment can help people run, walk and carry things. But they have totally different actuators. The actuators are decided by what you want to achieve or what problem you want to solve. When you want to draw but you don’t draw well, then the drawing machine allows you to draw easily and conveniently. The actuator controls the pen. For the exoskeleton, the actuator helps people to move and carry. I think the designer might get inspiration from the spider because the shape of the spider help it move quickly and distribute the pressure. Therefore, the designer uses a robotic exoskeleton to achieve that goal. 

Name: Linhui Wu 

Instructor: Marcela 

Date: 8 March 

Definition of Interaction

Interaction is a way that realizes the mutual communication between at least two organisms and helps each organism to understand each other. The forms of interaction can be multiple, and they can be sound, touch, language, even emotions but the reciprocal process involves several basic steps, receiving the information, giving feedback or reflections, analyzing and making actions.

As the author stated in “what exactly is the interactivity?”, “I’m using the terms actors, listen, think, and speak metaphorically, although the terms are literal to the most commonly experienced form of interactivity.” This process should be a sustainable and effective loop. O’Sullivan and Igoe conclude the process of interaction can be divided into “input, output, and processing.” 

The medium which achieves interactions is also various, including physical computing, visual communication and fabrication, even some toys and simple circuits. Interaction also can be divided into good or bad, effective or ineffective. I think good interactions should have social meanings and advance user’s experience.

Reference:

• The Art of Interactive Design, Crawford (pages 1-5)
• Physical Computing – Introduction, O’Sullivan and Igoe

Project

I appreciate the robotic arm and I think it helps to achieve effective interaction. It is useful in people’s daily life. It helps people to do many things, like combing, typing word, taking an umbrella, blowing a bubble. With robotic arms, people can use their hands to do something else. It is used for entertainment to make the user happy, especially for children, such kind of interaction reflect through people’s emotional change. It was also very beneficial for the disability. The robotic arms can “read” people’s mind and do the instructions. This indirect and potential interaction makes life more convenient. Robotics arm combines people, environment and some other different organisms. You can obviously feel the interaction power through the video when it does a series of things.

I don’t like this self-defendant jacket. I think this jacket is a failure of interaction. It is strange to wear so many cameras on the jacket. The goal of this cloth is to give a signal to someone who might attack you and record all the images that happened at that time. But it still cannot promise your personal safety. This interaction design is very complicated and inconvenient. And it is also not very sustainable because it might give a message to society “the environment is dangerous”. In other words, this jacket doesn’t enrich the user’s experience but increase their psychological burden.

Research Project:

Research Project prototype:

materials: wasted box, colorful blocks, paper, chopsticks, paper, bottle cap. 

The inspiration for our group work is from a daily life observation. When many students are playing the game home or doing the task in the library, they might feel very thirsty and they need to stop for water. Usually, they need to waste some time in walking to the water machine. This problem inspires me to come up with this idea to create a robot in 2119 which helps people to hold a cup and fill up the cup with water.

Similarly, we hope what we design should be a common product in 2119, which means everyone can access this product instead of only a few people can use it in daily life. A better interaction is not very complicated and better interaction design should not build up a very high barrier for the users.

Therefore, we don’t design a very omnipotent robot who can help people do everything. We design a cup robot which is easier to use and receive the instructions from users.

Another important thing I think is that a good interaction design should not make people lazier. If we have such a powerful robot that can do everything, then people will face a big mass and they won’t do anything at all. The “super cup” robot is specialized in filling water. And it saves time and can make people more focused on temporary things.

Some people are very busy and they might forget to drink water. It is not healthy. We hope this cup can monitor your personal need and provide water for you. It helps people balance their health and work.

When the cup is doing those things, they indeed are doing the interaction with the other factors and environments. When we make the sound instructions, it receives the sound information and it analyses and it makes actions, then fill the water for you. The interactions are realized, and the interaction process is just like a sustainable loop. This inner side will contain the medium and apply advanced technology, which is the approach to achieve interaction. The different parts of the inner robot and the cooperation of the robot’s different parts is also a kind of interaction. 

Such kind of interaction makes our life better and easier. You don’t have to operate it because it can automatically record a personalized healthy index. That’s why we call it a super cup. Healthy, convenient and sustainable are the characteristics of our super cup and are also what we think organic interaction should achieve.  

Though Lgoe thinks “Robotics, with its focus on autonomous mechanical systems, foregrounds the machine’s output, where I think physical computing should ideally foreground the person’s input (though not all of these themes do).”, I think we emphasize both the input of human and the robot for people’s health data checked by the robot indeed is input and the automatic action of the robot is indeed another kind of input. 

Reference:

Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and misses) by Tom Igoe

Poster:

Lab Date: Mar.1, 2019
Instructor: Marcela
Lab Partner: Daniel Qin 

Material: 

• Arduino
• USB
• Wire
• Breadboard
• Jumper cables
• Vibration Sensor 
• Joystick 
• Buzzer

My teammate and I have finished two different types of circuits and one combined circuit. We first choose the vibration sensor. We need a piezo element to produce voltage, and this shocks me because I didn’t know how the vibration caused by knock can produce. At first, I want to use power and my teammate stopped me and explained the reasons. A piezo is an electronic device that generates a voltage when it’s physically deformed by vibration, sound wave, or mechanical strain. Similarly, when you put a voltage across a piezo, it vibrates and creates a tone. Piezos can be used both to play tones and to detect tones. What’s more, we need a 1 Megohm resistor to protect the analog, and the megohm resistor should be parallel to the piezo. We succeed to monitor the “knock”, and we find it is very interesting, and our piezo element is very sensitive because it can detect even very minimal vibration. We even change the “knock” into a waveform to display the level of the vibration.  

But we find a problem, even we don’t touch it, there is voltage, and we found that we hadn’t demonstrated the “threshold”, then we correct it. It is easy to miss coding. 

Then we choose another sensor joystick Module. We succeed in building up a circuit, and Marcela recommends us to combine something like a LED or a buzzer, we choose to connect a buzzer. The first time, whichever we operate the joystick, the buzzer display the same level sound and duration. Then we realized that we didn’t add the condition “if” expression.  

Q1

In the recitation, we want to assemble the buzzer and joystick module. I think it can be used as computer game equipment. The X,  Y, and Z can change the direction of the player and the buzzer can be used as an indicator of game consequence, if the game player chooses the wrong direction then the buzzer will give a “danger” signal. 

Q2 

First of all, coding and cooking both require clear logic and a series of steps. If you miss an important step or some important coding language, then the project can’t work. It is just like cooking if you miss some flavors,  the dish will taste bad. Besides, different persons can produce different food with personalized taste, like coding, if you use the same language but different process and details, the consequence will be really different.

Q3

The computer plays an important role in our life. Compared with decades ago, the computer gives human a platform to communicate. People more share their feelings on the internet and make friends on the internet. People more and more regard computers as a necessary assistant in work and life. You can not imagine what life will be if there is no computer. What’s more, people use a computer to produce something amazing and unbelievable, for example, some App, some designs,  do engineering. It just like a powerful brain. People never to remember large files becasue we can use the computer to keep it. We write less and less because typing is more comvenient. 

Lab Date: Feb 22, 2019
Instructor: Marcele
Lab Partner: Daniel Qin 

Material:

1 * Arduino Uno: Can remember 
1 * USB A to B cable
1 * breadboard
1 * buzzer
2 * LEDs
2 * 220 ohm resistors
2 * 10K ohm resistors
2 * pushbuttons
2 * arcade buttons
A handful of jumper cables
1 * Multimeter 

Circuit 1: Fade

We just learned the knowledge of Arduino this week, which is useful to realize the interaction between human and project. The Fading LED circuit has very clear instructions, we use the analogWrite function in fading an LED off and on. AnalogWrite uses PMW turning a digital pin on and off very quickly with a different ratio between on and off, to create a fading effect. We use pin9 and declare it by changing the number in ledpin in coding. And we successfully made it.

Circuit 2: toneMelody

In this circuit, we learn how to use Arduino and coding language to have tone melody. We work fluently in this part. But we are curious if we will play very long music, then do we need to code every note, and how to deal with the chord.

Circuit 3: Speed Game

This circuit is more complicated, there are many wires and resistors. We feel a little confused. During the process, we make small mistakes, like do opposite the LED anode and cathode. But we realized immediately and correct it. We also found that we lack a wire after first failed. We added the wire and check again.

Circuit 4 (optional) 

Group work is really important for this part. You can never finish the task unless you cooperate with others. The team not only makes the work be more efficient but also strengthens communication skills. I also found that everyone has a different advantage, and we can utilize them. The combination of two breadboards is not difficult because they are symmetric. The most important part is the code because it decides whether the game function well. We increase the numbers of players from two to four and we need to fix all coding contains players. Then we increase the pin because it combines two circuits in some degree. Alex has very strong logic and is very patient in coding, which helps a lot. We try the first time but we find a problem, that is, the LED will only brighten on the loser side. We assume it might be a problem appeared in coding. We forget to adjust the LED part in coding. Then, we try another time, and we made it. 

Question 1:

In my opinion, technology has been a part of our life. We go to the store and purchase something by QR code instead of cash. We listen music, appreciate films and read the news every day from the telephone or computer. I can use facial detection to enter my phone instead of remembering a series of numbers. Technology makes our life more convenient and digital. The essence of technology is to make us directly interact with digital world or interact with others through the digital medium. In making the circuit, I also learned technology, especially in physical computing area. I learn how to use Arduino and coding to make buzzer have melody, to fade the LED and even play the game. These are the magic of technology, and these reflect the interaction what we pursued between human beings,  physical environment, computers, and electrical components. Those formerly alienated factors connect each other now through interaction. We can receive feedback and make reactions. Most interestingly, I can produce a game through technology, which brings happiness into our life. As what Chris Crawford defined about interaction in the article,  “an interactive process of listening, thinking and speaking between two or more actors.” And from the perspective of the computer, these three steps can be translated into input, process, output respectively. So what interaction means to me?  It helps computers understand my thoughts and realize my design, and it plays a role in connecting the computing world and my mind. When I am coding, I am communicating with the computer and trying to express my thoughts as clearly as possible. When the computer understands me, it will realize what I want. 

Question 2  

If I will have 100000 LED with every color and every level of brightness, I hope to put them into building an amusement park. The LEDs will be connected with some sound sensors and be decorated around the amusement infrastructure. The topic of this amusement park will be darkness. All amusement facilities are in darkness. When people play in some thrilling facilities, they may scream, and the LED will bright and forms different images and they may change along with the sound level. This will increase the visual and physchological experience of tourists.