Month: October 2017

Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0lS0mmjvCWPc0l5LU01QUxKc1E/view?usp=sharing

Description:
To me, Dandelion is a symbol for departure, whether it is the children leaving home to pursue their dream, or people coming out of their comfort zone. I left my home in China when I was 13 and came to the United States alone for high school and now college. One time, when I was back home, my mother said to me: “It’s strange but I feel like you have never left home.” This seems like to me is her wish–her daughter is home more often–being reflected and tweaking her perception of reality. I decided to capture that wish in my project. In this project, my dandelion doesn’t become bare after a user blows at it; it only spins faster in the opposite direction, a symbol of my mother’s conflicting emotion.

In developing this project, I ran into a lot of unforeseen difficulties.
1. Motor speed/wrong type of motor. I had to experiment with different motors to get enough torque to spin my dandelion. Some of the motors were not working with my current circuit setup.
2. Wind sensor. I accidentally broke off the little chip on the wind sensor and it was too tiny to solder it back. I got a new one but the new parts are not soldered.

If I had more time, I would set up 2 wind sensors to detect the direction of wind, which determines the direction of the spinning of dandelion. Also, I would make the dandelion “wings” expand and contract more drastically.

I saw this quote when I was a very little child and it has stuck to me till date. “A child gives birth to a mother” – I interpret this in two ways.

First, it could mean that only a child can make a woman’s life that of a mother. Having a child gives a mother another meaning to life.

Second, it could mean a girl child grows up to become a mother and continue the cycle of life.

For this project, I wanted to make a story around this theme. So, by using the concept of card-storytelling, I depict a girl child growing up to give birth to another girl child, who continues and this process goes on and on, continuing life.

On an implementation level, I used an H-bridged assisted DC motor to turn the circle of life as the story plays. For the cards, I used mini-servos to raise and drop the cards. These are programmed in unison to tell a story from beginning to the end.

Link to video and documentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-XYwe_ldmF9WUJzalFmd3RRcG8/view?usp=sharing

The challenges I faced were primarily setup related. I have never had any experience in designing and beautifying projects. This was my first small step towards making projects a bit more presentable than I had ever done. I still have a long way to go, but I respect the final iteration I landed up with.

Further, starting the servo motor was a bit of a challenge, but was quickly resolved by rewiring the entire circuit again.

For this project, I attempted to depict a bird leaving its nest for the first time and learning to fly.

I faced a couple issues with this project. With the first motor I used, analogWrite didn’t really seem to be working – my guess is that any time I tried to push less than the max voltage, it wasn’t enough power to move the motor. But I’m still not sure why the motor didn’t have slower speeds, and only either went fast or didn’t move. At one point, I also overheated an H-bridge and couldn’t figure out what stopped working (until I touched it and it was VERY hot).

video

motoStoryGillian arduino

motorStoryGnolan  Fritzing

This tells a tiny bit of a story about a bull that hates everything, and so it rams into everything it sees. Oftentimes its hotheadedness is to its own detriment. It has two states essentially, looking for something to ram and ramming.

I had a couple of issues that made this not turn out the way that I would have hoped. I couldn’t find a way to make controlled, repeatable motions with the motors, so any kind of story using the bot’s motion was right out. The motors also don’t have enough torque to move slowly, so what motion I could get out of them had to be quite fast and erratic. I had planned for two bots that would interact with each other, but I also realized that we didn’t have any distance sensors that don’t interfere with themselves, like the IR and ping ones do. Overall, this turned out ok.

video

code

For this design, I first thought of a famous story to tackle. Which is more fitting than the infamous tragedy of the two forbidden lovers? Romeo and Juliet simply want to be together, but if either of their families catch them it’s over.

My project sybolizes this using three servos, and an h bridge controlling a set of LED’s. I had to use servos instead of dc motors, because understanding position was key. The audience controls Romeo and juliet, and tries to avoid a patrolling guard. If the guard sees them together, he splits them apart and the two must go back home.

Project files here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_rqoxuDYou6Vks0dGhQNWw5YXM/view?usp=sharing

I had a lot of trouble with this project. First of all, I really liked my idea for a story portrayal, but was unsure of how to work an hbridge into it. I sifted through several ideas and finally decided on a very straightforward was of using it to control LED states. The biggest trouble came with testing the servos, two of them turned out to be broken, and much of my time was wasted troubleshooting why they were not working. I was then attempting to run three servos off of arduino power, which I read online was possible, and it was just causing the weirdest malfunctions. Sometimes they would just move randomly, and only rarely would it short the board, which finally tipped me off to the problem after hours of messing around with controls. I had originally wanted to use rotary potentiometers to change the position of romeo and juliet, but I switched them out because I thought that they were potentially causing the problem. If I had the project to do over again, I would put them back in, and add some buzzers or a haptic feedback device to simulate getting caught more than just the LEDs. I would also put more time into the creation and craft of the system, likely laser cutting custom parts instead of using found materials.

My assignment was inspired by the artist Jean Tinguely. I wanted to tell a kinetic story through a series of chain events. The motor drives a wire “gear” or hand that tries to latch onto the next hand. The second hand makes an attempt to connect with the third. I wanted to keep the forms more abstract to allow for an open interpretation.

Brennan_fritz+code

Process and Reflection

Brennan Process 01

Brennan Process 02

The project is supposed to depict two fish in water, with the big fish eating the small fish.

I used an h-bridge and motor for the small fish, and a servo for the big fish. There are three states in a loop:

1. small fish moving
2. small fish and big fish
3. only big fish (big fish ate small fish, small fish is dead)

The main challenge was that I did not plan well, and did not have enough time to make it look as nice as I would have liked, hence the jankiness. I would have liked to laser cut acrylic, instead of using cardboard and thermocol.

zip: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxDLW7cgDfWoWHdMVk54UlpTWkU/view?usp=sharing