Author: Roger

Materials

Arduino Uno: The processor to answer our code

Breadboard: the board we can build circuits on it.

Buzzer: play music when it receives electric signal and serves as the output.

LEDs: give light when it is powered on and serves as the output..

220-ohm resistors: add resistance to the circuit to protect the circuits.

10K-ohm resistors: add resistance to the circuit to protect the circuits.

pushbuttons: works as a switch to allow us control the circuits.

arcade buttons: add resistance to the circuit to protect the circuits.

Circuits

Circuit 1: Fade

diagram found here

Circuit 2: Tone Melody

diagram found here

Circuit 3: Speed Game

diagram found here

Circuit 4: 4 Players Speed Game

Processes

The first two circuits were very easy so my partner and me finished them quickly. The third one was a little bit complex and we used some time to finish it. The problem we met in the first three was some time we did not connect the wires to breadboard tightly. Thus, even if our circuits are somehow right, it could not work. We cooperated with another group to build circuit4 and we needed to connect our two breadboards together onto our Arduino Uno. I was responsible to writing code for Arduino Uno. I found that the programming language was very different from Python. For example, I always forgot to put a “;” at the end of each sentences. And I did not understand the loop logic at first, with the help of TA, I finished my code. But it seemed that my parent and other two students had problems about connect two breadboard to one Arduino Uno. But lucky, finally they finished their job and our circuit worked.

Reflection on the questions

Question 1

Technology does influence my life a lot. I am a person who likes drawing pictures. In the very beginning, the only way I can drew a picture was using the pen and the pencil. If I want to re-edit my work or I want to upload them to internet, it will be very annoying. And even use scanner, the picture will not be exactly the same as I draw on paper. Later on, I can draw pictures on computer and use Photoshop to edit it. If I make some mistake, I even can repeal the process. But at this time, I need to draw on a board, which is very different from drawing on a paper. Then, Apple Inc made the iPad Pro, where I can directly draw on the pad and edit it at the same way. In this degree, the technology made my life much easier.

In our circuit, first of all, the Arduino itself contains many technologies. It enables us to input our code inside. With our circuit, we made a competition whose judge is computer instead of human beings, which made our game fairer. I think this is how technology changes our life in our circuits.

Question 2

If I have 100,000 LEDs of any brightness and color and if I have enough knowledge to build anything I want. I want to build a model of our brain and each kind of color represent a different part of the brain. And I need a helmet to read the electric signal from our brain. Therefore, when people who wear the helmet think about something, the color of LED brain model will change. That so interesting and I think it is an art of the combination of human and machine.

Materials About Recitation

Our project is about building three circuits (Door Bell, Lamp, and Dimmable Lamp) on a breadboard based on the provided schematics. In my personal opinion, the goal of this project was making us understand the basic knowledge about simple circuit and how to use breadboard to connect different components. Below is my understanding of applications of each component. We used a Voltage Regulator to convert the Voltage of socket (220V) to 5V, which was the ideal voltage of our project and it could 12 volt power supply to give electricity power to our project. Buzzer and LED were the output interactions we want to see: if the Buzzer and LED worked, it showed that our projects were successful or not. Push-button Switch and Arcade Button were used to control our circuits. 220 Ohm Resistor was used to protect the circuits to make sure the voltage between components would not be too large. Variable Resistor was used to control the voltage between the two sides of LED in order to control the luminance of the LED. Multimeter was used to test all components’ parameters. At last, At last, the capacitor was designed to add capacitance to a circuit.

When we built the circuits, we had to understand the circuit diagrams first and then started at the positive side of the power supply. Then we connected all required components one by one. At last, we tested our circuits whether worked. In last recitation, we finished all the circuits required and all of them worked well.Below are three circuits we made.( Door Bell, Lamp, and Dimmable Lamp). The diagrams are at the end of documentation.

The door Bell circuit:

The Lamp circuit:

The Dimmable Lamp circuit:

During the process, we met three problems. The one was we did not pay attention to the instruction of the voltage regulator. We simply assumed that three legs of the regulator were the same. This problem made our first circuit failed. The second problem was that we could not use the breadboard neatly. We randomly chose two lines as the positive and the negative side of power supply and only used wires to connect different lines, which made our circuits a mess. The last one was that the circuit diagrams were different from the diagrams we learned in high school. So at the beginning, we tried hard to understand three diagrams. With the help of LAs and the study by ourselves, we solved these questions in recitation: we carefully read the instructions, learned to organize the breadboard by ourselves and drew new diagrams to help us understand the given diagrams.

Reflection on the questions

Question 1:

In the reading, it mentions that interaction is a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak. In our projects, it was hard to said our circuits could “listen, think, and speak” because they were too simple. But I still think there was a simple interaction in our circuits. Image the user of out circuits does not know our circuits and he gives a input to our circuits: open the switch. As the feedback reaction, our circuits will have a LED on or a buzzer giving sound. It will also send message to user, although right now these messages are not meaningful. In my opinion, that giving our circuits a particular input and then they can give a simple output is the interaction of our projects.

Question2:

To answer this question, we need to know why we need interaction. And in Zack Lieberman’s video, he mentioned that we want to tough our “pain” or other emotions. So I guess that we need interactions to make connections from our mental world to physical world. Thus, Interaction Design and Physical Computing are used as a way to first understand people’s mind, such as allowing them to draw a picture and then to make their mind visible and touchable, such as people can play with the pictures they draw. These kind of arts can directly have effects on our mind. I think the technologies are the method to realize making connections and to draw a close relationship between mind and body is the way Interaction Design and Physical Computing be used to create Interactive Art.

The circuit diagrams: