george_wang – F15 60-223: Intro to Physical Computing

D3b: Portal Cam

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 17:50:32 +0000

Portal Cam is an exploration to bring more community awareness in the CodeLab. In this iteration, I focused on making it more easy to use. Inspired by the Polaroid instant camera, I build a camera case with a button that resembles the shutter button on the camera so the users can intuitively understand the design.

During the test period, several people in the lab tried it. And they can operate the camera easily. And most of them were surprised when another person’s picture printed out. Generally, they thought it was an interesting experience.

The camera consists of a Raspberry Pi, a thermal receipt printer by Adafruit, and a USB Webcam. You can find the complete code on my Github.

]]>

D3a: Portal Cam

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 17:14:25 +0000

The aim of this project is to bring more awareness of community in the CodeLab. CodeLab has a diversity group of graduate students from Computational Design, Emerging Media and Tangible Interaction Design. I designed a camera that takes a picture of you but prints out previous person’s picture. So you can know who was at the lab. And hopefully it can make people become more engaged in the community.

]]>

Final Project: Portal Cam

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 22:38:00 +0000

Portal Cam connects different places and different time. It conveys the moment by something physical rather than digital.

In this iteration, I established a Wi-Fi connection between two cameras. When the user presses the button on one of the cameras, it will first take a picture of you and upload it to the other camera. Then it will print a latest picture from the other camera’s uploads.

A Portal Cam consists of a Raspberry Pi, a USB Webcam and a thermal receipt printer. The case is laser-cut black acrylic. The sync mechanism is achieved using Dropbox-Uploader. All the programs are written in Python2. You can find the code on my Github.

One thing particular difficult was connecting Raspberry Pi to CMU-SECURE Wi-Fi. I uploaded my network configure file to the Github for your reference.

]]>

Mobile Robot: “Robot Love”

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 05:59:28 +0000

Team members: Qiaozhi Wang, Varun Gupta, Anatol Liu

“Robot Love” is a simulation of what falling in love is like, but for robots. It shows the search through the world that people start out doing before falling in love. They push against the boundaries of the world they are in. Sometimes when they encounter the perfect companion, they aren’t able to actually connect, but other times, the companions encounter each other at the perfect time and they are able to connect and fall in love. When they fall in love, people stop pushing against the boundaries of their worlds as much and start focusing on the other person instead.

You can find the code of the project in here.

Vimeo / George Wang – via Iframely

]]>

mCookie by Microduino Studio (2015)

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 23:14:31 +0000

mCookie is the latest project from Microduino Studio. Their goal is to make all the different sensors and circuits into a unified stackable design. Therefore it makes the prototyping process much easier and cheaper.

All mCookie boards are Arduino-compatible. Makers can write their own programs in the Arduino IDE and upload their code to the hardware via USB. It dramatically decreases the size and cost of design prototyping, improves flexibility of Arduino-compatible boards, and enhances the user experience of building IoT projects. You can learn more about this interesting project in their Kickstarter page.

]]>

Week 1 Challenge – ESP8266 OSC Bridge Demo

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 03:59:38 +0000

After some effort, I have successfully configured the ESP8266 as an AP access point, which also has server capabilities. So once you connect to the AP Wifi with iPhone, you can send OSC message to ESP8266 server port using TouchOSC. Then you can easily relay that message to arduino via serial port in order to control the LED. You can find the Arduino code and more information in my Github repository.

Here is the Fritzing breadborad diagram:

Here is a short demo video:

YouTube / 王乔志 – via Iframely

]]>