We live in an era of constant monitoring and electronic intervention. Mobile technologies have enabled fast computing on our persons in all aspects of our lives including, education, biometric monitoring, social media correspondence, and much more. With this in mind we approach our final project with a focus on wearable devices, biometric monitoring, fitness tracking, and any other type of on-body sensing or actuation. This may include VR/AR, watches, e-textiles, etc. The focus of this proposal is not to describe perfectly how build your project, but how a user would interact with it. Consider this an exercise in describing an experience not a technology. The proposal will be in the form of a short video (between 15 and 30 seconds), and may use live action, stop-motion, animation, or any other technique to describe your proposed experience. You have only two days to generate this video so the focus is on the idea more than the craft of the video. A rough animation of a great idea will be more convincing than a polished less developed proposal. You will work alone and we will break into teams of two on Thursday to move forward. Good luck!

Make a sensor from a microphone that measures/detects an environmental condition that is not an audio source. You must convert some other physical energy (displacement, light, electricity, heat) to sound to be sensed by your microphone :

DETAILS

The first week of the project will be follow these steps:

1) Identify the source that you are converting to audio. This may be a human interaction like a button push, or it may be an environmental condition such as wind speed or temperature. For the sake of describing an approach we will use a button press as our example input in the style of Valkyrie Savage’s Lamello.

2) Convert the energy into sound. For the button press I would take the following steps, create a set of tines that get plucked as the button is depressed (see this video of a finger piano), connect those tines to a resonant chamber, and place an electret microphone in or on the chamber.

3)Transform your incoming signal to the frequency domain using an FFT to gain visual confirmation that you can differentiate the signal from noise.

Projects

• Acoustic Barcodes
• Lamello
• Acoustruments
• SpectraScreen
• Scratch Input
• Floor has a voice

Tutorials

• Jesse Stiles DSP tutorials for Max (particularly chapter 08 and 09)
• FFT
• Paul Bourke’s Post on DFT and FFT
• Adafruit Electret Microphone

Base Code

• Photon fft/tcp
• Processing tcp example

DELIVERABLES

The initial prototype is due Thursday, February 4th.

A working mechanism with the associated FFT displayed on your laptop is required.

Banner image is from Daniel Sierra’s Oscillate

Computational Design of Linkage-Based Characters

EXPLAINED: A system for designing linkage based characters using a catalog of linkage types.

CHOSEN:  I chose this project because it shows a new approach to designing complex linkages. This gives users without large amounts of domain knowledge solutions to a challenging and complex problem. The UI itself could be used to help design my whiteboard drawing robot.

CRITIQUED: This project does a fantastic job of providing an interface and process for the design of complex linkages based on an input motion. This works well as animators design motion without regard for physical fabrication and this tool would allow those same users to design their own linkages based on the aesthetic choices of an animator.

RELATED: This work falls within a broader field of animation, computer graphics, and physical prototyping. A few notable examples are:

• BACHER ¨ , M., BICKEL, B., JAMES, D. L., AND PFISTER, H.
  2012. Fabricating articulated characters from skinned meshes.
  In Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH ’12.
• http://robot-kingdom.com/dog-quadruped-robot/

LINK: https://www.disneyresearch.com/publication/computational-design-of-linkage-based-characters/