The last week or so of working on the Media Controller was kind of a race to get everything done before Wednesday.  We settled on materials and the sound design and got some working code, but in the end ran out of time to tweak the code to work exactly the way we wanted it to.  We ended up with something that looked really close to what we had envisioned, but ran out of time to get the code—and therefor the sound and motor reactivity—totally right.

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After a few meetings between Lilia, Justin and I, we came up with some basic principles for the concept of our media controller assignment.  Vaguely, this was described as three objects in an environment that react to a user and have sound, visual and physical reactions.  Justin summed it up as:

“A lyrical exploration of the moment when something, for the first time in our universe, became alive.”

Lilia added that it would make sense to look at that idea but from the users perspective.  Once we got together yesterday to work with some of the materials, this idea became very clear.  We had talked about using a key to activate our objects.  The burlap fabric Lilia brought in was much more sensual than I had imagined.  Once we began to construct the flower like forms, it was clear that it felt more natural to touch them and sort of tease and mold them.  The wire base, which provided some buoyancy to this interaction, encouraged touching and feeling.  This realization was exciting.  It took the idea away from the key-in-hole interaction to a more subtle touch/feel interaction.  It was obvious that we should move from sticking something into the forms, which evokes penetration and the little kids toys we saw in the Joy Mountford lecture.  We now had an interaction that evoked the feeling of a child discovering a washed up jelly fish on a beach and poking it, and finding the jelly fish still had life, or perhaps giving life to the jelly fish.

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This is a towel dispenser in the bathroom at one of my favorite bars.  The thing that is remarkable about this towel dispenser is that it knows if there is a paper towel waiting to be torn from the dispenser and won’t shoot out more paper towels if this is the case.  This seems pretty simple, but it confused me and a lot of other guys I noticed trying to get more towels.  For obvious reasons, I couldn’t document this (I guess I could have secretly left a camera somewhere).  It was funny to watch guys continually wave there hand across, trying to get that second bit of towel, thinking that the machine had broken.  Some guys tore off the towel and tried again and got another towel.  Others just gave up.  So it’s sort of a step towards a more sustainable towel dispenser.  The directions are kind of redundant.  I would assume that most people are familiar with these towel dispensers but it tells us both to wave our hand and that it’s motion activated.  But it doesn’t say we’re only supposed to get one towel.  It tells us that implicitly through it’s action.

Coolest lab by far.  I used the potentiometer to make the graph, which was kind of boring.

Made the ball move using FSR and IR sensors.  Way more fun.

It’s all coming together….

I didn’t do these labs last week because I was busy with the Stupid Pet Trick, so I did them this morning.

I set up the servo motor:

And then built the musical instrument.  I only had one FSR so I used different pressures to determine notes in order to play a melody.  My speaker was really quiet for some reason, but I could hear the melody.

Here’s the code I used:

#include “pitches.h”
int analValue;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
analValue = analogRead(A1);

int pitch = map(analValue, 0, 1000, 0, 3);
Serial.println(pitch);
Serial.println(analValue);

if (pitch == 0){
tone(8, NOTE_C4, 10);
} else if (pitch == 1) {
tone(8, NOTE_G3, 10);
} else if (pitch == 2) {
tone(8, NOTE_B3, 10);
}

}