Final - Air Guitar and Punch Paint
This project was meant to explore how I would be able to seamlessly integrate sensors into clothing. Unfortunately for me, other than my project malfunctioning on presentation day, the accelerometers I ordered came late so I could not explore this aspect of my project further. In order to make for that I decided explore what else I could do with accelerometers embedded in clothes, the obvious choice was to measure movement especially large ones, so I had the idea of making a visualization out of movements which I could use to expand upon the Wushu I am learning by making it more colourful.
The original idea was to blend technology with clothing was to make a standalone air guitar and use the Arduino to pick and choose the sound generated by movements. I would have liked to use a wave shield and memory card but accelerometers are very expensive so I had to use the Arduino by itself. Normally the arduino can only output a PWM signal at about 500Hz which isn’t nearly fast enough for audible sound generation, luckily, it is possible to change this rate and get it up to the actual 16 MHz at which the Arduino runs by changing some register values concerning its timer and using interrupts to output the signal to a speaker. Unfortunately the sound which you can output has a very low sample rate compared to that output by a sound system or computer, but doing it this way gives very dynamic and complete control over the output. The reason the sample rate is that low is because the Arduino can only do so much between interrupts and setting the time between interrupts to low will lock up the Arduino because it won’t have time to execute its interrupt programming between interrupts. I used some instructions and code from instructables.com to create my version of the code and adapted to be used with two accelerometers instead of one and a ultrasonic sensor with buttons.
The second idea of the project was to use the data gathered from the accelerometers and use it to make a visualization. Again I do not know how to use MaxMSP or programs like it so I decided to use Flash since I can program with it, however I did not realize that repeated vector drawings would cause such enormous slowdowns on my computer. The explanation for this is that Flash is extremely top heavy and does not make any use of a computer’s video card (all drawing operations are done with the CPU) so unfortunately it would impossible to make a complex vector base visual with Flash without certain programming structure alterations, some of which I have learned about, such as sprite preprocessing and double buffering. The idea would have worked if I had used a program that specializes in visualization such as PureData or MaxMSP because they make use of the proper parts of computer. To connect the Arduino to Flash I used Processing for the first time. Processing made a serial bridge from the USB port to Flash because Flash’s security features do not allow it to interact with computer hardware.
I wish to continue this project as both the air guitar and separately as the motion tracker, but I will have to brush up on my sewing and ability to connect very small electronic components. I plan on making the air guitar closer to the one featured in the tutorial I used to give more accurate notation. For the visualization of movement I’m going to have to learn something faster and more computationally powerful like MaxMSP. And one universal addition to the project would be to add Bluetooth antenna or equivalent to make it truly a stand alone device and completely flexible.
Links
How to Make an Air Guitar with the Arduino
Sound Generation with the Arduino
Schematic
Communicate - Readings
I don't think that programmable matter is the be all and end all of physical computing and tangible media. It would be extremely convenient sure, but both articles point to technology which is extremely expensive and highly experimental. From a farsighted perspective those two problems are not unsurmountable but I would advocate using cheaper more available materials whenever possible. However, the possibilities presented by these articles are very exciting the idea that one could theoretically design a piece of matter would be great for design and physical computing allowing for more desirable properties in matter. What could be highly interesting would be computers that are invisible until they are called upon like some sort of swarm network that would call upon other nodes to for more computing power, or chairs that could transform into tables on command.
Communicate - Pessimist
The node that I have created for the communicate project uses electromagnets to move ferrofluid held in its cradle. The way the magnets are activated according to what the bytes represent as a 24 bit array. The magnets are activated for 300 milliseconds for every value of 1 and turned off for every value of 0. the name comes from the modification function which reduces the values received based on how dark it is, values only remain unmodified if it is extremely bright. It then echoes the modified values and sends them.
Not much research was needed to create this project since the hardware was essentially the same as the previous project with sense. However, I was able to solve the problem we encountered with wall-mounted outlets by using a voltage regulator to change the current from pulsed to constant. This allowed me to acquire much higher current and voltage than from a battery or a constant current power supply. Unfortunately testing revealed that small electromagnets are very weak without the use of secondary power supplies among other modifications as well as huge amounts of power.
The original design of the Pessimist was supposed to use three homemade electromagnets, however, because they were weak, I switched to two small manufactured electromagnets, which didn't work that much better at similar currents and voltages.
Schematic
Sense
Animate Project
Animate Material
Thinking about a useful installation and not one that just looks pretty, I thought of magnets as my material, more specifically when used as generators. A generator can be made using by passing a magnet through a coil of wires, the more powerful a magnet and the more coiled the wires the better the generator. Most generators convert kinetic energy to electricity. My proposal for a kinetic harvester would be a trampoline which would have small generators installed in each of its springs. You could further extend this idea to a sidewalk or an entire building, which could be powered by its usefulness to people because it would collect their kinetic energy and convert it to electricity.
Switch
My switch project is a glove with LEDs on each knuckle. Each LED is turned on when the corresponding finger is curled. If I were to go further with this project to involve the Arduino I would make it so that different finger positions would trigger different patterns.
Odd Materials
While looking for material for applications in art I stumbled across this article, aptly named 7 Man-made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics. The three materials I'm particularly interested in from this article the ferrofluid, non-newtonian fluid and elastic conductors
Ferrofluids, as the article, states are liquids made containing iron nano-particles that have been evenly distributed within it. The result is a liquid that is very attracted to magnets and whose shape changes in very visually appealing ways when within a magnetic field. This has already been used in an art project as shown in the video below. If I were to use it, especially in the spirit of this class, I would attempt to make the liquid react to my audience in some way such as suddenly activating electromagnets at a certain proximity, giving the fluid creature-like characteristics.
Similar to the ferrofluids, are non-newtonian fluids, specifically the one nicknamed oobleck (after a story from Dr Seuss), which is a mixture of cornstarch, water and food colouring. There are many varieties of non-newtonian fluids but the type that I'm interested in becomes more solid when force is applied to it and returns to a liquid state when there is no force acting on it. These kinds of liquids react to vibrations in an interesting way, again giving them a creature-like behaviour, though the method would be different from ferrofluids.
You don't have to try very hard to think of the possibilities of what someone could do with elastic conductors, especially if you plan on using them as screens or something. The only problem with them is that they aren't easily available yet and are VERY difficult to make, but if I had the opportunity to use them I would think of making interesting clothing or some rather colourful robots.