For the first two circuits my partner and I built, we were able to figure things out fairly quickly, as fewer components were needed when working with the arduino. The main struggle we had was with the arduino pins. We would either not initialize the pinMode() in the sketch, or we would place the wires in the wrong pin of the arduino. Circuit 1 was the easiest to build, and we had no issues with the code.
With Circuit 2 (Melody) we forgot to change the pin number in the sketch and we also forgot to open the file that supplied the musical notes to the arduino. Along with this, our speaker was very quiet and so we thought our circuit was broken when we really just couldn’t hear our speaker at first. However, we then ran the code and had no issues.
For the last circuit, a lot of tinkering was required. When we opened the model on TinkerCAD we were very careful to follow everything as closely as possible. Our main struggle was keeping track of what we had completed. When we first built the circuit, we also had some issues with the second button not registering the score. After we reconfigured the sketch and the circuit, we got it to work.
Lastly, we worked with another team to try and make the 4-player game. My partner worked to connect the two circuits while I worked to modify the code. For the circuits, we chose not to remove anything and hence made things more complicated by adding even more jumper cables. However, this led us to get confused on which button and which LED was which, which ultimately led to more issues. As far as configuring the code, my main issue was reconfiguring the conditional statements, and trying to figure out how many cases to add with the addition of players. Due to time constraints, we did not end up finishing this circuit, but we tried. 🙂
Question 1: (Reflect how you use technology in your daily life and on the circuits you just built. Use the text Physical Computing and your own observations to define interaction.)
Throughout my day-to-day life I use technology in a variety of ways. Whenever I want to talk to my family or friends, I call them over Wechat or talk over social media. Along with this, I never carry cash and use my phone for all of my payments. For places like Starbucks and Wagas, I have membership cards which are kept on an app. Most days I use my phone to order delivery and all the work I do is on my laptop. Most often, the technology I use I use to make my life more convenient and streamlined. Even in my bedroom, I have an air purifier which changes its settings dependent on the quality of air surrounding it and I have a remote control air conditioner. These technologies are used to enhance my living space and also provide a small
Question 2:
If I were given the chance to work with 100,000 LEDs I would choose to make a mirror out of them. However, I would not want this to be a typical mirror. The mirror I would create would use the intensity of brightness to reflect how far away a person is. If possible, I would even like to customize the colors to reflect the personality of a person and combine this with the brightness to create an interesting interpretation of a mirror (ie., mirror captures your body shape, but if you are a quieter person, the LEDs are a bit dimmer, or the colors are darker, etc.).