Category: Assignment 3: Motorized Emotions

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

Laughing Boy: An Animated Emoji

For this assignment I animated a laughing emoji face. The story goes that the boy is always happy and laughing but really needs his personal space, so as someone gets closer to him, he laughs more slowly. The further away people are from him, the harder he laughs.

Initially I had buttons as inputs so you “tickle” the face to make it laugh, but I changed it to an IR distance sensor just for fun. I had a bit of trouble with wiring it, but they were pretty simple mistakes so it worked pretty smoothly once I fixed them. Also the output readings from the IR sensor were different every time I uploaded it, but I fixed this by playing around with how I calculated the delay and soldering a pin to the end of the wire on the IR sensor. After that it worked pretty smoothly.

Video: https://youtu.be/b4o6-_xikzI

Everything else is included in this Drive file including fritzing sketch and reflection: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bw2BkLX-TTddTXVobmxxczVneDQ

HappySad

link to assignment:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxDLW7cgDfWoVXQwVkZSclYxUUU/view?usp=sharing

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-XYwe_ldmF9dlpjREplRU9KMmM/view?usp=sharing

This is my submission for Assignment 3

Motorized Emotions:  Make a kinetic interaction that expresses an emotion.

Due:  Wed, 27 Sep, 23:59hrs.

Find an emotion you can display with motion.  A couple of examples I used in class:

• Light makes plants happy:  Use a photoresistor to detect light and create more motion when there is more light, less motion when it is dark.
• Cats like to be petted:  Use buttons or other inputs to “pet” your cat, use a servo for a wagging tail and tactors to simulate purring.

Document your project with a Fritzing sketch of your circuit, an Arduino sketch, and video.  I’d like everyone to demonstrate these in class on the following Thursday.