Day Three

Agenda

1. Welcome back!
2. Introduce the first assignment, due Sep 10
3. Show the sample project(s).
4. Show the example deliverable. Be sure to observe formatting so the blog looks consistent across your results.
5. Form or confirm first project groups by end of today.
6. Continue with exercises.
7. Brief end-of-class idea showcase.
8. We have set up a new purchasing link on the main page.

Don’t forget to review day two.

All in all we heard a lot of great project ideas today. In nearly every case we asked for more specificity: who will use it? Where? How? Why? For musical projects, with which piece of music would it work? What’s the overall narrative?

All ideas can be rendered at all scales. The essence of a big idea can be isolated down to an elegant small example.

It may help to think of this project as the first step in a larger project; for more ambitious ideas try to think of the smallest first step which can be tested with some basic circuitry and mechanism.

If you need other parts, please fill out the purchasing form linked on the top menu, and we will do our best to accommodate you.

For some areas of inquiry which were addressed there is a lot of prior art; please look up the relevant artists which were mentioned and find related projects for inspiration and focus.

A couple of specific technical questions which were answered:

The relay schematic is a logical illustration, unlike the pinout illustration which shows the physical connection layout; the two only correspond via the pin naming. This is common in electronics diagrams since schematics are intended to convey the logic of an electronics design.

If an analog sensor doesn’t emit the right voltage to drive a particular circuit, it is possible to construct a passive resistor network add an offset voltage, or an active op-amp circuit to offset and scale the signal to the appropriate level. E.g., the Sharp rangefinder output is too low a voltage to directly trigger our MOSFETs.