Category: Assignment 4: Story of Motion

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

zip: assignment 4

video: https://youtu.be/h3AtkzsaTRg

For this assignment, I wanted to tackle the story of the Loneliest Whale and create a children’s mobile prototype that gives the whale friends!

The By matching the tones of the whale’s call using a potentiometer, you also match the level that all the whales swim at, so by matching the tones, you conclude the story of the Loneliest whale by finally giving it companionship.

To create this project, I connected servos that moved together (the companion whales) to sit at their own level with a potentiometer, while the Loneliest Whale moves at a different level (a different servo). Simultaneously, the entire mobile is placed on a laser-cut disk so that when I hold the top of the motor, the entire motor’s body (and thus the whole mobile) rotates instead. I couldn’t figure out how to turn the whales without tangling the wires any other way. Finally, the potentiometer used for the companion whales are connected to the output of one speaker (that emits a range of tones.) The intention is that the Lonely whale is emitting a singular tone in another speaker, and then the level the whales swim together at would be the same tone of the Lonely whale (so that their sounds match).

The above was the ideal, and I can say that what I achieved was quite close, but would require a little bit more tweaking to get higher fidelity.

The biggest problem I experienced was programming using millis() to avoid delay(). Overall, my process was to program each individual part (motor, servos, and sound) separately, and then mesh them together at the end. To do so meant I needed to avoid delay() all together to have everything run smoothly.

Another problem worth mentioning, was the problem of not getting the motor to work towards the end, because the tone() function I used caused problems in the pwm pins I had attached my motor too. This was a small but documented problem I solved! (With a lot of happiness).

final video

final code

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Technical Reflection:

I initially wanted to represent the action of ‘killing’ time through the shadow of a knife over the clock, but found the lamp didn’t produce a pronounced shadow. I also had the idea to fire a toy gun at the clock in a cycle, but I realized that these kinds of ideas were too blunt. I found that using just fake blood splattered on the clock face provided enough of a clue as to what’s happening to the clock.

The motor I was using was also fairly low torque, so I wasn’t able to slow down the clock enough to resemble a normal clock without stopping the motor completely. Also, the motor I was using was far too loud to hear the ticking of the clock, I might have also compensated through some other timer to generate noise.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this project, I feel I was fairly successful in achieving the atmosphere I wanted to create.

Zip File with Fritzing schematic and code:

Assignment_4 – Eliana Cohen