Struggle for scrapping

I had such a long time to make a decision on my fina project. When I met with my advisor, great Marina, I told her about my worry and she told about tweenbot of which function is nothing than keeping going to its destination. It sometimes caught on the edge of the street, but people help it to keep going, wow it attracts people to help it. I found the moving object’s attractiveness through this good example. Then, I decided to concentrate on making kind of game platform, which can motivate people’s interest and interactions. I started to think about what I need. Wooh, There were so many things to consider than I roughly thought.  (I struggled to calculate relative position of the robot, because I knew that setting camera would make thigns more complicated but failed..)

I already built the robot for mid-term, so I started with setting tracking system.  I used color tracking method, it was not that big deal to track specific color on the white paper. The trickiest things was that camera’s eye and projector’s eye are different, even the camera tracked  the robot’s position exactly, it showed weird position. After several shots, I found that getting exact area of  the stage and cover the screen with that texture is the most effective way to map the position. The result was quite great, but it still depends on the degree of camera set.

Then, I started building physical objects. I choose cardboards, it is cheap, light (important for my robot’s balance), and easy to deal with (important to me). I am quite proud of my robot, it looks neat, but not very proud of my joystick box. It was too weak, so broken now. In terms of making robot, what I concerned about is setting the wheel as low as possible, (close to the ground) not to lose balance.

Next step was getting all things together smoothly. The processing sketch became huge to include all functions needed, and two serials made sketch really heavy. It was kind of struggle to make it smoothly. What I wanted to show for final was running real game on my PlatBot, but failed. For now, it just shows some kinds of effects, pretty though.

I had lots of probelem with the bots, but I am still fascinated by them. I wanna keep working on this, and make virtual PacMan!!!

Oh, I wasted my thanks giving holiday in bed, I don’t even have arduino for my robot for now.

I don’t know what board is good choice for the future. Fio looks cool, it says that it can upload the code wirelessly ! (Perhaps I should test about 100 codes.. so being easy to upload code is necessary) However, I am not sure that all functions will work well with this litte board. Its voltage is 3.3 V, it is not very good.

It seems that I need this one to make my robot communicate wirelessly, but this cute litte wireless bluetooth chip is fucking expensive, yay. I seriously started to consider giving up two robots communications.

How can I control the robot? I struggled to think new way to control the robot, but I just made conclusion that joy stick or controller is almost instinctive way for controlling the robot. I won’t think about it anymore.

Game Logic!! Since I gave up two robots communications, I had to make new one. Oh.. what can I do.

- Finishing game logic

- Building Robot

- Making wireless communication

- Mapping the robot’s position for projection …what?! :0

: I tried calculating relative position with arduino nano + bluetooth mate. Here’s the result. This video looks like magic, but the fact is that it doesn’t track things accurately, as time goes it loses the position of the robot. This is just.. best illusion that I could get

IMG 0651 from Hanbyul Jo on Vimeo.

hello cutebot_pcomp_midterm from gj lee on Vimeo.

GJ did great documentation about our mid term, so I put the link for that : http://leegj.com/itp/?p=390

Our cute bot is being made now..

CuteBot ProtoType Ver.1

My physical computing croup decided to make little light following robot.

Our little robot will drive around trying to find a beam of light coming down from above it. We will use a laser cutter to make the bus, wheels, and other structural components. We also want to try and not use any pre-fabricated board, instead only using the micro-controller, motor controller, and other discrete components. We will program and prototype using the board, but then move the chips, motors, circuits etc into the little housing.

our inspiration!

This is the first step for our robot. We just tried to make motors move with arduino, but I think it is a meaningful step !

This week, I played with tone and servo. It was interesting to use switch as analog input with different kinds of resistors. At first, I couldn’t understand why all buttons are connected to 5V, but now I understand the characteristics of parallel connections.

Play with tone

Play with servo 

Making real movement by servo motor was exciting. My arduino board kept turning off because I couldn’t find exact positions of capacitors. I put capacitors backwards, that was why capacitors were so hot and board did not work. According to introductions, it could even explode, hew…

One good thing in making images by code is that this enables us to disassemble our visions. Let’s say that I want to create a couple of circles which are not that boring. When we draw this ellipse in GUI program such as photoshop or illustrator, everything is so smooth so we almost forget what elements are needed for drawing the circle. On the contrary, when we want to draw something by code, we need to know all elements which are necessary for drawing, we need coordinate of center, color, stroke type, weather to fill it or not and etc etc… This process makes the visual cognition unnatural thing, and makes us to find more abilities of our visions.

look same? 

  However, we tend to focus too much on visions, it has been true since 18 C when Kant underestimated the sense of the touch. We have connected the touch to feeling or other kinds of sentimental things, not to scientific analyzing, this is the writer’s awareness issue. The author refutes this typical defining of the touch, and shows some examples of people who lost their body parts but still feel phantom part stimulated by other parts than original ones. The author argues that if the sense of the touch is contructed in certain ways, we can seize the sense and represent it.

The author’s examples are amazing, and I vaguely agree with his opinion. The author says that if there is a market, there will be the future of the touch. The thing is that I am so used to using my eyes, so there are not many rooms to imagine for other senses that sight. How can I or we expand our thoughts beyond the sight? I think this questions can be linked to the question in the reading for 1st week, ‘What is good interaction?’. The answer for this questions was ‘ Somethings which make full use of our senses.’ Efforts on the future of the touch would be useful of course, and it also would expand our imaginations.

I want to start this post with mentioning my interactive installation. When the audience opens the box, the camera in the box captures the audience’s face to make it  displayed on the stairway. Then, whenever the audiences step down the stairway, the part displayed on the stair breaks down.

Break Me from SungJin Nam on Vimeo.

Personally, I really like this work (even though it is mine, whatever ). This is the first piece that I could show my work to public. When I finished the this installation, I was so so so tired, fell asleep with full of heart. However, my phone rang and woke me up. It was the curator from gallery, she said that she would put a sign on the box, “Open the Box”. I said “Shit, no, never do that.”, but she called me just to inform me, not to ask about my opinion.

Well, I have to admit this, it was true that this piece seems to fail to attract people to open the box naturally, because my coworkers and I wanted to avoid typical interactions. Though Tom Igoe said that there’s a lot we can add to the thing already done in his article, we felt like avoiding typical things including video mirrors, body-as-cursor, or LED things that have occupied the modern art gallery before. However, in terms of interactions, ‘typical’ might not be the bad word. ‘Typical’ means that people are already too familiar with something, they know how to make something work without any efforts to figure out. Moreover, as Norman said, poor interactions cannot be covered by the label. If I failed to make people to interact with my work, the failure is reflecting my work. If I should attach long long statement to my work, it would be better to make games with thick manual book.

However, I still believe that struggling for new interactions is valuable, especially in art field. Even though un-seamless interactions will sometimes need self-explanations and bother the audiences, some ( or few) of those things would be able to expand the way audiences expand. Moreover, these experiments cannot be done in industrial field in which all people are working for perfectly comfortable interface.

I made birthday cake for me by Arduino

LED candles turn off when people breathe the candle. In fact, it does not feel people’s breathes, the mic inside of the cake catches volume. The most challenging thing in the project was building micro amp for myself, I found a good circuit example on Tome Igoe’s blog. I learnt really a lot building this circuit including a role of capacitor, or how to connect the variable resistors to other parts of the circuit. However, if you can find one (I couldn’t) I recommend using built-in circuit. As Igoe says, it’ll save you some troubleshooting time, and cost about as much as the circuit below.

http://www.tigoe.com/pcomp/code/arduinowiring/208/

I am so proud of myself to build this circuit by myself (I bothered my friend a lot though)

Next thing was soldering. There were so many wires, so it was a bit more tricky than I thought.

Yay, my birthday cake! 

 My presentation docs link : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11dGJl-OYyEeoB34cJp2YLluEwShe5QIdoGZcMO696kE/edit#slide=id.p