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 blog post documenting your project.
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 :
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.
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
]]>You will then make a blog post of your discoveries, following the format below:
IMAGE: You will begin your post with an image of your chosen project. Images must be at least 756 pixels wide, and must be linked to the full-size image.
TEXT: Here you will provide text in the format specified below.
LINK: Please post a linked URL of the project here.
VIDEO (OPTIONAL): If there is a youtube or vimeo video, please link embed it here.
Repeat these steps three times!
Each post should contain THREE relevant projects. Projects you write about should be projects you’ve newly discovered while doing this research, i.e., projects you haven’t come across before (though feel free to add those to your post beyond the three).
]]>Make a wheeled robot that completes a challenge on a whiteboard table. Your team may choose from one of the challenges below:
This is a fast and dirty project which will give you guys the opportunity to program your Photon boards, design physical mechanisms, utilize the tools available in IDeATe, and build with available hardware. We don’t expect these prototypes to be pretty. This project is about the process and the focus should be on functionality and simplicity. You only have a couple of weeks and a lot to learn.
You will work in teams of 2 (may have one team of 3 if there is an odd number). We will assign groups based on the course survey and discussions in class. Your team will select a robot type from the list above and get cranking. We will provide examples of DC motors, servos, stepper motors, ultrasonic depth sensors, photoresistors, etc.
Some example projects are listed below for inspiration and instruction (we will add to this list as you guys find more useful examples):
The final (working) prototype is due Tuesday, January 26th.
In addition, a blog post including the following is due 1/26, as well:
The purpose of this assignment is to ensure all students are familiarized with the PhysComp lab and the primary computational tools used for the duration of the course.
npm -v into Terminal. If it responds with a number (like 3.3.12), you’re good to go.npm install -g particle-cli
sudo if you get install errors.particle setup
Control-c to exit the prompt. IMPORTANT: Do not continue onto further steps in the wizard.particle serial mac