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Proposal for final project
Posted on November 28, 2005 at 03:04 PM by sj695
Description
Graphic and Audio display of the latest news items from the internet via Google News
Breakdown of what I need
News Balls
News Collection
Music
News Titles
News Source Count
News Connectors (Connectors connect news items from different categories)
News Voice Reader
News Zoomer
Rules???
What I already have
Class for Ball
Adapt the processing's ball example
Breakdown of specific tasks and a time line to accomplish
By November 21
This proposal, project mapped out
Combining pieces of code I already have
By November 28
Balls Loading News from Google
Click and display news
Maybe scrolling news at bottom
Maybe background music
By December 5
News Voice Reader
News Zoom
For the Final presentation on December 12
Graphic and Audio display of news
Bonus stuff would like to do (but probably won't have time)
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Ping Pong - The Remix (Preparations)
Posted on November 17, 2005 at 04:28 PM by sj695
In order to make our ping pong to work wirelessly, we have decided to use plain old Radio Frequency (RF) Serial Communication. RF transmitters sends bits on pulses of radio energy, and what attracted us to RF frequency is it’s flexibility. RF unlike Infrared serial is omnidirectional and can go greater distances, even through walls. This makes it great for our ping pong application, because as you saw in last week’s Ping Pong video there were lots of acrobatic movements going on. RF is also much easier to program compared to bluetooth. So hopefully we will be able to save more time.
In order to differentiate the signal from ambient radio or light waves, the data is sent on carrier wave. Actual information is encoded by slightly varying the frequency of the carrier wave (FM) or signal strength (AM). We will be using 315MHz.
What we have so far:
Laipac Transmiter & Reciever
 
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The coding that we have so far, but still needs to worked on as we are picking up other signals we don’t want.
inbyte var byte ‘ incoming string
outout portb.1 ‘ status LED
output portc.6 ‘ serial out to PC
input portc.7 ‘ serial in from reciever
n_2400 con 16780 ‘ baud mode for serin2 (2400-8-N-1 inverted)
n_9600 con 16468 ‘ baud mode for serin2 (9600-8-N-1 inverted)
i var byte ‘ loop counter
RFSerialIn var portc.7
PCSerialOut var portc.6
StatusLED var portb.1
‘ flash status LED to start:
high StatusLED
pause 500
lowStatusLED
main:
‘ this serial call does nothing until it gets bytes:
serin2 RFserialIn, n_2400, [DEC inByte]
‘ high statusLED
‘ if the first three bytes are “OBJ”, then
‘ the fourth byte is data. parse it as a number (DEC inbyte (3))
if inbyte > 0 Then
serout2 PCSerialOUT, n-9600, [DEC inbyte, 10, 13]
high StatusLED
‘ PAUSE 500
‘ LOW StatusLED
endif
‘ low StatusLED
goto main
0 CommentsPing Pong - The Remix
Posted on November 10, 2005 at 05:19 PM by sj695
Here's the link to our presentation of our final project in Physical Computing.
Ping Pong - The Remix (PowerPoint Presentation)
Ping Pong - The Remix
Posted on November 10, 2005 at 04:21 PM by sj695
Our idea is to re-create the ping pong application, and make it wireless this time. As we all know it’s always hard to jump around like an acrobat playing ping pongs with long tangled wires attached to the paddles. So this is our solution, going WIRELESS!!
WATER
Posted on November 07, 2005 at 01:49 PM by sj695
“Understanding the fact that we are essentially water is the key to uncovering the mysteries of the universe. If you reexamine the world around you from this new perspective, you will start to see things as you have never seen them before.”
Masaru Emoto - The Hidden Messages in Water
The most important thing in the world, the closest humans can come to God, the word I chose to write about is Water. I once heard of an experiment where different words were taped to glasses of water and later photographs were taken of the crystallized forms of the water. In the experiment, positive words produced beautiful photos of star like crystals while negative words produced pictures of dark depressed crystals. This got me to thinking about the fact that we’re 70% water and how we are affected by the different logos on the clothing we wear. I also think of bottled water, a friend of mine was telling me that Stern business school has their own bottled water. Is “Stern business” a good word or bad word? Is there another effect besides good or bad? Is this the reason Evian taste better than Dasani?
So we need 8 glasses of water a day, with a little effort this should be a pretty easy task considering the world is made up of oceans, rivers and lakes. So why does bottle water cost more than gas? The other day water was pouring from the sky, and I went to the deli and paid 3 dollars for a bottle of water.
8 glasses a day, that’s how much water we need to drink a day. Man that’s a lot of water. What happens if we don’t drink our 8 glasses? Will we dehydrate and dry up like a raisin in the Sun? I also find it amazing the combination of water and sun has on us as humans. In some ways they remind me of the mother and father. Which would be considered the mother or father, water or sun. And isn’t it really nice to go to the beach and hang out in the water on a hot sunny day? Water and Sun a perfect balance without sun there is no growth, but without water we dehydrate, with out water no energy, no spirit.
Water, the quiet giant with strength to move buildings, with ability to move throw even the smallest of cracks. When frozen transformed into floor of ice strong enough to hold hundreds of humans. Water the mother of earth. All that in glass in a glass of water.
Water is such an awesome thing. Last night I made pasta and boiled two cups of water and put my noodles in and in 12 minutes my stiff noodles became nice and moist. After preparing my plate of boiled noodles I went to the freezer and put 4 frozen cubes of water into my glass and poured my 3 dollar bottle of water into the glass. As I ate I turned to CNN to watch the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Can you believe the entire city of New Orleans was submerged under 20 feet of water? Seeing all that water on TV made me have to use the bathroom. I went to the bathroom lifted the toilet seat, peeed, and flushed. I was wondering, where does all that water go?
[Hold on for a second, I need to get a glass of water]
Okay, I’m back, what was I talking about? Oh yeah water. Like the ocean, rivers and lakes water connects us all. We’re nothing but a bunch of connected bodies of water.