Final Product :: Animal

The final product for Design Interaction and Environment is the 100mm cube called "Animal".
It consists of a perspex box in two halves; one half is the base that  holds the electronic components and is black, the other half is the top and is frosted with trace paper.

The electronic components are:
Arduino Uno
9 volt battery

Aluminium Foil - used for the capacity sensor

50 Ohm resistor - used for the capacity sensor
thermometer - measures the voltage difference which is mathematically converted to degrees

Photo-resistor - the output is mapped between 0 - 255 and controls the amount of light emitted

RGB LED - That uses the thermometer to determine its colour and the light level of the room to determine it's brightness.

The "Animal" starts to purr as your hand moves closer to it and the pitch of the purr increases as you touch it. This is due to the capsense library that has been programmed into the Arduino. The circuit created between Pin 4 and 2 which goes through the al-foil measures the changes in capacity. These figures are then sent to the speaker which gives the user audio feedback of the capacity change.

The other important function that the "Animal" carries out is feedback on thermal comfort. If the temperature of a room drops below 18 degrees the animal gets cold and turns blue. If the temperature goes about 26 degrees the animal gets hot and turns red. Whilst  the temperature is at a desired level the animal will maintain a green glow.

The thinking behind this kind of feedback is to make people aware of there immediate environment. Animals are significantly more a tune with their environments but humans have lost touch. I believe that if people where able to understand the changes in thermal quality of there environment they would be more proactive about self regulating there environments. The Animal also allows the user to test and compare different spaces to one another to assist them in understanding the environments they use and dwell.

The learning experience during this class was amazing. I was exposed to another side of the design process that I have not yet been exposed to - making. This course has helped close the gap between me getting and idea designing it and sending it off to a manufacturer. In future I shall design and now build, the liberation gain by the Design Interaction and Environment unit will help me move forward in my field of Architecture; both in  the professional world and experimental research world.

Concept development

From my concept last week and the discussion from the forum I have decided to try and create something of an animal. The animal will react to different situations:

when it goes dark it will glow white
when you touch his head it will vibrate softly and glow green
when its tail is touched it will vibrate aggressively and glow red
when it is picked up it will vibrate quickly as if flinching and flash blue and yellow.

It will be put in a little cube and hooked up with a battery that will recharge with the group.
When with the group the animal will purr and pulse through the colour.

Components:

sensors spine - softpot
sensor light - photosensor
sensor touch - piezo element

reaction physical - motor
reaction audible - piezo element
reaction skin - multi-colour LED

My research so far has allowed this to happen except for the motor which is broken. I'm using a blue glow at the moment to demonstrate the workings of the animal.

video of outcomes

The touch sensing is alluding me at present but I'm off to get a new Piezo element tomorrow.

The image below is an option for creating the objects.

Final option is a munging of two things.

A crafty twine ball

http://www.bunnings.com.au/learn-how-to-diy_diy-project-centre_detail.aspx?id=111&categoryid=0

A crafty device called Twine

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-listen-to-your-world-talk-to-the-internet

The object would mimic the capability of the 'Twine' and look like the twine ball. 

Another development is the Capsense library. The capsense library is basic enough and easy to manipulate. One pin sends out a current another pin picks up a current and measures any changes in it. As a group we then hooked that up to the speaker which demonstrated that it was working. The issue is that it was so DAMN SENSITIVE! It was a very difficult thing to control especially when hooked up to a battery. It seems to take the electrical field around it when it is first plugged in as a constant but as soon as the base current alters it would freak out and stop working properly. Persistence is required and shall be applied.

Project proposal

Light Sensitive mood lighting objects.

Like the 'Air quality egg" I would like to design something that responds to the immediate environment of the user.

The initial idea is a box that responds to light, or rather a box that dims as it senses light and brightens as the light around it dims. The function of this is to provide an ambient light through out an environment that uses power only when necessaries. The other function it service is being highly mobile so that the light boxes can be place through out a setting and rearranged according to the needs of the user.

The features I would include in the box are:

Arduino
Photo sensor
LED (preferably a colour changing one)
Piezo Element (detects touch/ vibration and will scroll through the colours)
button (on/off switch)
dial (further control the emitted light)
battery pack
box (material TBC)

The product is not large on it's own but if you added many together and arranged them creatively you could create large displays as sculptural pieces within a setting.

Precidence to this Project are:

The light cube:
http://vimeo.com/31061149

http://vimeo.com/31285060

The difference with to the project I wish to attempt is that the box will be more refined and have a few more controls in it.

The items I'll need to investigate are:
- Interface
- Power
- Arduino Board (perhaps a nano or mini may be more appropriate).

Music

We are the Music makers.

Circ - 06 was nice and easy to set up, which was refreshing after the polava of the motor (which turned out to be a broken transistor). The first think I noticed was how annoying it was to listen to twinkle twinkle little star over and over again, so I endeavoured to create a drum beat.

The way the tuning works from the Arduino interface to Piezo Element is through the current going through it and making a little element inside the object vibrate. The faster it vibrates the higher the sound the slower it vibrates the lower the sound. This is how I created my drum beats.

Timing was really tricky as we put a dial into the mix and created a make shift for loop to control the speed of the instrument. We also had to make sure we stayed to a generic 4/4 timing so that if we did sync up that we didn't then play extra bars and fall out of sync again!

Interestingly I learnt that the Piezo element can work as an input also, as when it is reversed it will detect vibration. The principle is: as an output it has a current sent through it and it makes noise, as and input it is moved which creates a current which is read by the Arduino software.

Spin motor spin.. please? come on SPIN WILL YOU!!!

The Arduino spin motor spin does not seem to work as smoothly as the Arduino code book would like us to believe. The myth is yet to be solve but it seems that the transistor is to blame for the mishap of the motors movement.

First thoughts were that one needs the 330 ohm resistor instead of the 10k.

Second that the diode (one way value) is pointing the wrong way.

..Perhaps the positive and negative motor wires are the wrong way around.

first lets have a look at the making of the transistor. Below is a handy site which explains the transistor in english and will aid in your understanding of this revolutionary tool

http://www.technologystudent.com/elec1/transis1.htm

 Basically though - the transistor has a positive or collector (typically to the left of the flat part) and a negative or emitter (typically to the right of the flat part). The current will go from positive to negative therefore it goes from positive to collector and emitter to earth. The other prong (the middle one) is the thing that triggers the transistor - it receives a signal and the circuit works - no signal - no transistor - no circuit.

Now, the thing that absolutely baffles me is that to get this thing to work I have to connect the transistor to the circuit backwards. With the current flowing into the emitter and then coming out of the collector to ground - IT WORKS!

First I thought that maybe the transistor I had was built backwards?

data sheet time.

http://html.alldatasheet.com/html-pdf/5611/MOTOROLA/P2N2222A/259/1/P2N2222A.html

no. not the answer.

Is the diode pointing the incorrect way?

no, make sure that the diode (the black band points to the direction you want the current to flow) is pointing  from positive to negative and it will control the speed of the motor. If it's the other way around the motor speeds up substantially.

http://www.technologystudent.com/elec1/diode1.htm

A diode makes sure that the current flows one way and avoids a backwards short circuit.

The diode in our case is meant to create a loop surrounding our motor. I guess this is to make sure the current doesn't flow back through the motor which would stall it.

Is the motor the wrong way around?

No, it totally doesn't matter it just changes which way the motor spins.

The circuit is clearly working as if you just connect the motor to 5v and GND it goes ballistic, so what is going on? The other odd phenomenon which occurs is:

IF I SET IT ALL UP ACCORDING TO THE BOOKLET AND SWITCH THE 5V AND GND IT WORKS! 

After all of this however if you set it up correctly (as per the book) making sure that:

-the diode is pointing the correct way (black strip up towards 1)

- you use the 330 ohm you can then control the motor.

- that the flat part of the transistor is facing j (contrary to what I just told dan)

It will work wonderfully.I decided to give the instructions one last red hot go - this time it worked... I think this is going to be one of those long frustrating semesters.

conclusion - not sure what happened tonight however the circuit seems to work if you put the diode and transistor backwards however the code then doesn't work.

CODE03 lesson 3

IF ALL ELSE FAILS READ THE INSTRUCTIONS -  IF THAT FAILS LISTEN TO PAUL. 

Time to code my motor. Yay!

Adding the light sensor was pretty straight forward after we got them working.
I was all about grabing the value from the analogRead function and mapping it to 0 - 255 and applying that to the engines on/off function. Lastly we re jigged the code to make it more responsive to the changing light.

Lastly I managed to snap the cord off my motor, which concluded my evening and this post.

P.s to Stephen - I know the colour scheme I'm just pretty colour blind thus becomes a little frustrating whilst at home.

First meeting.

The workshop was nothing near what I expected, but seems like a very interesting group of people. The range of things these guys did was fascinating however the project that jumped out at me was an appliance shield for the Arduino. One of the members of the group had created a shield (plugs on top of the Arduino) which you can then connect and control your appliances with. He couldn't stress enough about how dangerous it was (burn your house down dangerous) but it is inline with where i'd like to be with digital design.

Exercise 1

The first real exercise for me was to get the Arduino working on windows 7. As i'd never done any thorough 'run' based mods to the system is was the tiniest bit daunting. The LED light display was really exciting but i;m curious to know the science behind how the circuit board is programmed. I started reading about it here but there were too many acronyms for me to follow. My option is to ask the guys at the next meet for a dumbed down version.

Exercise 3

Whilst the many LEDs of exercise two work fine I cannot get the motor to turn in exercise three. I'm not sure what I've missed so again it's one for next meeting. I'm hoping to rig the fan up in front of the thermometer and have it switch on a a certain temperature, then as the blown air cools the thermometer the fan will turn off. Simple.

Class.

In class following the first meeting we ran through a little bit of ohms law. V = I/R:
V - voltage - the big water tank creating pressure at the top of the circuit.
I - Current - is the water that goes through the circuit.
R - Resistance - the size of the pipes that are in the circuit.

So, If you have a massive water tank full of current and only little pipes (lots of resistance) only a tiny bit of current will fall through. However if you have a massive pipe and a little tank all the current will disappear through the system very quickly. This is why ohms law is so important to electronics.

from there we experimented with the Blink project. To make it more interesting we added 'variable resistors' in the form of a dial and a flex sensor; these two thinks help control the speed at which the LED blinked.

LED :: DIAL :: FLEX SENSOR

To get the variable sensors to talk to the LED we needed to send it through the analog in's and use the function analogRead(XXXX). we then gave the returned value to an integer ei 'lightLevel' which we then fed into the stop start integers of the LED.

Concurrently we learnt the Serial.begin(9600); / Serial.println(XXXX); commands. This allowed us to monitor the information going to and coming from the arduino board which assisted us in debugging our code.

Introduction

At the start of this year I created a project with an Xbox Kinnect and a projector which turned a dull lobby at  newActon into a lively engaging space. The things that were limiting was my amateur understanding of programming and the hardware that was available. Design, Interaction and Environment was an attractive option because it allows me to understand how to manipulate the hardware whilst programming concurrently.

My interests are in Architecture and I would like to understand the new aesthetic available with digital design. If you take a curtain - it is essentially an environmental control with you as a monitor. It is available in many shapes and sizes, it is adaptable to many situations and adds an aesthetic to the space it is hung. There can also be made by anyone with limited sewing and carpentry skills.

Environmental monitoring systems available to the public lack some of the curtains aspects. Many people do not know how to use them, program them, where to place them, what they actually do and only a handful of people would know how to build them. Thus you have to employ a company to install them and tell you how to use them in a specific way. This creates a gap between the maker and the user which makes the product expensive and inefficient. However the Air Quality Egg is a step towards solving these issues.

Have you ever wondered what the air quality is out there? With open source hardware and the infrastructure in place (internet) a few clever communities in NYC and Amsterdam where able to develop a sensor that measured the air quality around there city - both net and local. The designers focused on producing a product which is: easy to use and therefor more accessible to the masses, able to compare data amongst other users which increases the users ability to understand the output information, it is platform focused which means that it can be updated/expanded and not become superfluous and thrown out, and finally it is community funded.

 The main topic this article raised for me is that data is everywhere. At the beginning of Digital design I believed data was this source of info that you grabbed off the internet, however with the ability to create data catchers and monitors data is available anywhere!

The air quality egg helped me understand how digital design can be directly applied to the architecture in a new and exciting way. It will hopefully open up peoples eyes to what happens in there dwelling and the potential of a new digitally enhanced architectural aesthetic.