Hannah Kim

Short Description: This work is basically a box which uses twitter to find out the world’s collective mood, and then changes color to reflect that mood. The Arduino connects to a wireless network via a WiFly module, constantly searches Twitter for tweets with emotional content, collates the tweets for each emotion, and then changes the color of the LED to represent the current world mood. Red = anger, yellow = happy, pink = love, white = fear, green = envy, orange = surprise, and blue = sadness. If a sudden high number of tweets of a particular emotion are found, then the LED flashes to alert us of the possibility of a world event that has caused this surge of emotional reactions.

Response: Though I am not sure how accurate this box can be in doing in what it says it does, I dont really mind. I think it’s a romantic and neat little idea to be able to find out what the average mood of people all around the world is, and a good way to see right away when something has happened in the world. The cool thing about this is also that it doubles as a somewhat nicely designed lamp. Another interesting thing is that while looking at the comments I realized this project is actually over 6 years old. To me it feels like a project that is recent and still relevant, which is cool.

Creator: Randy Sarafan

Description: This project is a automated drum set in which the drums are hit using drumsticks driven by car door lock motors that are controlled by Arduino Unos and Arduino Motor Shields.

Response: I think this is a very interesting and unique use of the Arduino. As a musician I can see this being very useful. I would imagine that you can program the drums to play through specific songs, allowing you to play another instrument along with them.

In the video, the drums seem to be rather quiet. If I were to make my own version, I would try to use a stronger actuator possibly with variable strengths. This would essentially allow you to vary the volume of the drums. Thus, the drums can be set to play either quietly when its late at night and you do not want to wake up your roommate, or loudly when its the middle of the day and you really want to rock out.

Project Title: Friend’s Light

Project Creator: Jihye Jeong, Heeju Kim, Youbin Nam

Response:This project was to create an interactive light, which had different outputs depending on both the light and level of interaction. They had created three different types of lights with little characters that went along with them. This project really intrigued me because they took the basic idea of light, but turned it into both a fun and almost living object. It’s one thing to simply create a product, but to integrate characteristic through light makes it that much more fun and valuable. What I may do to change it is to more clearly distinguish where the area that is supposed to be touched to turn the light on. Also, another note would be that if this was to be a product, I would have two modes where there was a simple light mode and an interactive mode this way, a person could have a simple light or have a character. The blinking of the light I understand brings life to the light bulbs, but practically speaking it would be nice to just kind of have a light since the form itself is already playful.

Project: OpenBraille, a DIY Braille Embosser

Project creator: Carlos Campos and Christelle Fournier

Short description: OpenBraille is a embosser for braille that uses a physical encoder and roller, thus allowing each embossed braille letter to be sequentially printed neatly. OpenBraille is created using 3D printed pieces (as the embosser), wood (as a frame), and an Arduino board (as the “brains”, or what helps communicate the messages to the actual roller embosser). By using 3D printed materials (which need an embossed approach as opposed to the conventional punching letters out approach), this lowers the expense of this machine and therefore creates a more affordable form of assistive braille technology.

Response: I think it is an incredibly resourceful and meaningful project with much more potential. It is a great start to help assistive technologies become more affordable and exposed to larger communities by 1. coming up with novel solutions to the dilemma of medical companies creating expensive and unattainable products and 2. allowing others to create and develop their own prototypes and/or products by providing their exploration, development, and programming code. One of the ways in which I would improve this project is if there were perhaps a way to create a system where one could speak out loud and have a translated middleman that could then command the Arduino to emboss the words, and/or a smaller version of this embosser machine, perhaps to a laptop version so that one could carry it with them on the go, almost as if a modern day type writer of sorts.

I was introduced to the Crowbox last summer and immediately knew that one of my goals for this academic year would be to obtain the skills and resources to build one for Carnegie Mellon’s campus. This was my first exposure to Arduinos and one of the reasons I registered for this class.

The basic premise of the Crowbox, created by Joshua Klein, is that of a vending machine for crows, which, through the use of gradually progressing steps where the box functions differently, trains crows to find coins and deposit them for treats. The first step does not involve any electronic functionality- the treat compartment stays open as birds find the Crowbox and get used to its presence in a certain area. In the second step, pressure sensors below the lid of the treat box trigger the Arduino to control motors that open the treat box. In the third and forth step, the box opens when a coin is deposited through the slot; in the third step, the box itself dispenses coins, so that the crows encountering it are hopefully able to discover the connection between dropping coins in the slot and receiving treats, and are motivated to begin bringing their own coins.

The physical design of the Crowbox involves a box that holds the Arduino and other electronics, with an opening through which coins can be released, and an attached treat tray with a sliding transparent lid.

Unlike many featured Arduino projects, building the Crowbox is not the goal of the design in itself. The goal of the Crowbox, beyond training local crows, is to run a global experiment about whether different populations of crows respond to interaction with people and technology differently, and to prove a point about other potential uses of human-crow interactions. I find this to be a fascinating use of technology, particularly of Arduinos and the general field of small, user friendly computer systems that now allow virtually anyone to build electronics that can interact with the world in meaningful ways.

Description: The keyless lock box uses an optical finger navigation (OFN) sensor as a combination decoder. This sensor must be in direct contact with your finger. Movement across the small surface of the sensor is converted to X and Y distance measurements (up, down, left, and right). The combination, if entered correctly, initiates the movement of a motor that unlocks the box.

Response: I thought this was cool because even though there is a combination lock on the briefcase, the actual combination is over a small sensor. The combination lock is just a way to throw someone off. I think that’s genius because you can’t solve a problem (opening a locked box) if you don’t know the problem (where the lock is). The misleading presence of the combination lock is another level of security itself in addition to the certain up/down/right/left sequence. I think this could be improved in security like if the combination lock moves around too much (for instance if someone was tying to guess the combination lock to open it) then the box could let out an alarm sound which would only stop when the correct hand gesture is input.

I find it intriguing because he only used one Arduino (as far as I can tell) but was able to control many LED boxes, each seemingly operating on its own. I like that the user is able to set the colors for the boxes themselves, but the motion of clicking to cycle through the available colors is rather tedious. There must be ways to re-think how the user interacts with the boxes in order for it to convey the picture it wants. What may be an interesting addition would be having some sort of tablet that the user can change the lights on (as if in a simple software like MS paint) and have the wall change in real-time. This would also enable the user to possibly control the LED’s more efficiently.

Matt Richardson

In this project, Matt pairs a sound sensor with a DSLR in order to automatically trigger the shutter for use with high speed photography (such as capturing the moment of a balloon popping or a wine glass shattering).

I think this is a really cool use of Arduino since it seems that a major purpose of Arduino is a DIY way of connecting electronic devices. This project specifically shows me how Arduino can serve as the brains between input sensors and some sort of physical output.

Short description: An analog giant 7 segment display made with cardboard and servo motors that displays numbers by rotating brightly colored pieces of cardboard rather than lighting up LEDs.

Response: I can see a lot of cool uses for this module within a larger project. It would be useful for displaying large numbers in some application where the digits themselves do not change very often, as unlike a light, it uses most of its power only when changing states.

One obvious problem with this design is that the number being displayed might be unclear when the module is viewed at an angle. Since the segments just get rotated 90 degrees, they would still be visible from the side or from the top even when they are “turned off”. A possible solution could be to rotate the segments 180 degrees.