Month: September 2017

Confused but Irritated Faces

For this assignment, I wanted to transition a face from a neutral expression to an irritated expression by changing the states of each motor (6 in total, 2 for the mouth, 2 for the eyes, and 2 for the eyebrows). If the audience were to come near the photosensor, the motors would go to new positions to scrunch and look towards the direction of the sensor (maybe to warn the audience not to come near).

This project was relatively straightforward, but over time I interestingly ran into a few problems (still unresolved). My general process was to take each servo one by one, to ensure each of the motors would respond to the sensor. The first time I put everything together, the servos worked correctly (see video), but after half an hour or so, the servos started fidgeting. At first, I thought it was the way I programmed it, but over time I came to realize that the amount of power needed to control 6 servos was too much. The second time around, when I assembled more than 2 together, they would fidget and not work correctly (no changes to the program made). If I were to refine this, I would like to play with an alternate power source to avoid the fidgeting.

Video: https://youtu.be/6wD-HHZuRHU

Zip File: https://cmu.box.com/s/y8exprgw8plgt1gtg83e3b6j8i0cwl3i

For my project, I made a dog/cat/some 4 legged thing up to the viewers interpretation. The emotion that is portrayed is fear.

It starts off on alert, with pulsing orange lights. Once it calms down, the lights turn off. At this point, if it detects any motion it goes crazy until it wears itself out, and the cycle continues.

There were a couple of technical issues that had to be solved, like servos not playing nice with neopixels on the arduino at the same time, but nothing super serious.

video – https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6bFUuOZ0DHJRjI0amFveDNjUnc/view?usp=sharing

code – https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6bFUuOZ0DHJeXFSZGVZLTNXa1k/view?usp=sharing

I used several solenoids and a IR motion sensor to create my device. I think I’d like to call it “monster in a box” or something along those lines… Anyway, I envision him as this cute little guy that gets very scared and skittish when you approach him. He can only peek out one side of the box though.

The IR sensor reads the distance, and then a random pattern displays on the solenoids, increasing in speed as you approach.

assignment3

Updated Documentation:

 

Old documentation:

 

 

 

tmustako_assignment_3-20170928T022727Z-001

This device personifies, well buggifies, anger of a disturbed bee. The yellow board serves as the basis of the little creature. And all the components are stuck to the board, just like the parts of a bee are stuck to its fuzzy body. A red LED illuminates to show the stinger of the bee, and a piezo buzzer audibly conveys the bee’s angry wingflaps.

A viewer can interact with the piece and make the bee angry! On the converse, to show the bee is angry, the circuit also needs to show the bee is not angry. So, a viewer can tap two capacitive sensors, one to make the bee angry, and one to make it less angry. Ideally, it would be a fun interaction if one sensor could be used for both interactions. A jab interaction would make the be angry, but a petting motion would calm it down.

To make this program happen, I combined two example sketches, and modified the code some. I started with the TouchSense 1188 example. The program registers which pin is touched, when the pin is touched. I changed the program to increment a counter when the angry pad is touched, and subtract the counter when the happy pad is touched. The second example program was to control the position of a servo with a potentiometer. The main problem I encountered during this was trying to integrate the two programs together. Additionally, two of the capacitive sensors were not registering, but that is probably because of the nature of the sensor pads.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sn3x6xGiFQ&feature=youtu.be

Zip: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6FN8R0MrzCKS29BbHk3ZW84MEE/view?usp=sharing

 

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/0B3_nRvY5FHyHQW1ONktzQWxrMHc

For this assignment, I created a board that imitates playing catch with a dog. A solenoid is the “ball” being thrown, light races across 3 LEDs (as a dog would run across a yard) at varying speeds dependent on “dogEnergy”, and a servo wags its tail in an arc proportional to “dogHappiness”. The “dog” is happier/more tired when it is played with, and more energized/ less happy when its fed (it’s high standards for food are unfortunately rarely met).

Push buttons allow the user to play fetch with and feed the dog.

This is a video of my project: Happy and Hungry Pupper

Here’s the zip of my project: zipMotorEmotGillianNolan (feat .ino and .fzz)

Project: Swimming Octopus

When first hearing about the prompt, I thought of the idea to create an octopus that would “spit out” ink when someone got too close, thus illustrating fear. I started along on my project with creating a laser cut octopus with two detached tentacles and an ink splotch with the intention of using servos to move the tentacles and ink splotch with servos. I then constructed my circuit and wrote my code and tested them without much difficulty – I had no real hardware or software bugs this time as the circuit was rather simple: the two tentacles would sweep constantly, unless someone came too close to the IR sensor which would trigger the ink splotch servo to spin out from under the octopus.

However, when attaching my pieces to my servo, I found only devastation. The pieces were far too heavy to move by the servo. Unfortunately, with the time I had left to complete the project, I thought the safest solution was to recreate the mechanical pieces by simple paper cut outs. In the end, I got a working project; however, it was a very unsatisfactory conclusion. If I were to redo this project again, I would either try again to maybe laser cut out cardboard pieces, as well as create better enclosures for the motors and the circuit so the servos would not create so much ambient movement.

Zip File of Project: Motors Assignment

Youtube Video of project: https://youtu.be/99TpKd8yPhw

For my project I wanted to express panic. I made a cardboard figure with wings attached by servo, and a tilt sensor. When the figure is upside down, the servos speed up and the figure appears quite panicked.

zip: assignment3-ScottHamal

Here’s my project, “Success”

The user wears a glove which corresponds to a finger poised over a bowl. Making a grabbing motion while wearing the glove causes the finger to reach into the bowl. Inside the bowl is a light, which gets brighter each time the finger tries to reach into the bowl. The finger will also reach farther into the bowl over time as well.  Eventually, once the light reaches its maximum brightness, the finger stops working, and the light fades out.

I had some issues conveying the grabbing motion. If I were to redo this, I would make a full hand and figure out a way to tie all the tendons in the fingers to a single servo, as I only wanted to use one servo. Also, the flex sensor wasn’t terribly accurate, and thus can be a bit twitchy. I could have also filtered the sensor values to smooth out the motion. The last change I could have made was to use a lightbulb instead of an LED, but I was wasn’t sure about the external power requirements it would require.

Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxEy1_Wr9TRpa0NYUk04eGZLajQ/view?usp=sharing

Zip File:

assignment3