It's working!!

I finally figured out the error in the sample circuit in the large pillow. The + and - leads for the vibrator were both touching the vibrator housing, thus short circuiting and diverting the current around the vibrator.

Simple fix -- tape the leads down.

Yay!

*Old Post* Final Presentation - Concepts

***Old Post for Final Project. We eventually went to a new idea***

Yesterday, our team ( - Federico and + Katherine) started working on hashing out ideas for our final piece. We began by making a list of things we thought were fun and embodied play. Our list included things from bouncy castles to throwing paint.

At the end, our current idea (which still needs to be readjusted and fleshed out) is to make a two-room piece in which actions the audience performs in one room affect the dance performed in the next room. The audience will think that the first room is self-contained, and will be moderately entertained by playing around with things

Work Day 4.21

Work Day on Sunday Night 4.21

Debugging the electronics of the pillow creatures...

6:00-7:15
Started by talking to Catherine about what's currently wrong with each creature. I think the list is as follows:

Large Pillow:
      - None of the vibrators are working
      - Voltage connection to XBee is shaky
      - The voltages on the transistors are not very intuitive

Medium Pillow
      - Flex sensor data coming from pillow is not intuitive (We have no idea why it's sending what it's sending)
      - LEDs are not mapped to the correct flex sensors

Small Pillow
      - Unknown... Wait on this one

7:15-
Catherine has to go home, started working on understanding one isolated circuit of the Large pillow.

7:30 --taped down conductive thread connections, stopped flickering of power to circuit.

7:45 -- I think the voltages going into the vibrator are reversed...

8:00 -- No they're correct

--Break from 8:15-11--

11:13 -- The battery is dead. And the low battery has been causing a problem. It can't supply enough voltage for the Arduino to properly send out 5 volts on 5 pins. With the USB cable attached, the proper voltages are sent out.

     

Project Meeting 4/12/13

Project Meeting 4/12/13

Today's goals:
- Get two XBees connected.
- Get Pillow Creature 1 to talk to Touch Designer
- Get Touch Designer to receive data from Kinect

Find-a-conference/festival!!

While searching around the internet, I found a conference called SPLASH (Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity). The home page is here:

http://splashcon.org/2013/

This conference discusses how to use different systems and/or computing techniques to better integrate software with humanity. I thought our project would fit nicely here because our project deals with two different types of human/software integration: the Kinect, and a physical computing sensor blob.

Here is the website for the Student Research Competition:
http://splashcon.org/2013/cfp/due-june-28-2013/664-acm-student-research-competition

And here are the details involving submission:

Submission Summary
Due on:	June 28, 2013
Notifications:	July 28, 2013
Camera-ready copy due:	August 28, 2013
Format:	ACM Proceedings format
Contact:	Isil Dillig and Sam Guyer (chair)