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| Week 7 |
The Blues Chair - with Ryan
There is something very charming about old furniture. They makes almost everyone fascinated by. Maybe it's the nice wood, the massiveness, the beautiful design.
Trying to figure the magic behind these oldies, we hide inside them some new technology while trying to maintain the beauty and the nostalgic feeling they arise.
So - our project contains a beautiful old Philco radio from the 40's and a wooden chair on wheels. Each one was connected to the main Furniture Server with an Xport.
The chair had some Reed switches
on its base. These switches activates from magnets.
We put a group of magnets on the chair and each time someone swivels the chair the magnets touch
a different switch and a special message was sent to the server.
On the other side waited the old radio. Once it got a message from the chair it tried to tune-in to a different station. The affect of tuning was achieved in 2 ways: (the radio of course doesn't really work)
one way is connecting the dial to a servo motor and moving it left and right and the second way was playing old Jimmy Reed's blues songs
using MAX/MSP as the DJ. The messages were sent to MAX using MIDI.
We also used super bright LED's to make the radio glow.
Radio pic code
Chair pic code
MAX/MSP code
Ryan's wiring diagram
It worked and I was pleased with the results.
But why, why does it have to be soooooo frustrating????
Every time we start a new project and seems to be in control of it, in terms of code and components, something must go wrong.
And when one problem is solved a few new others arises.
It makes me wonder how stable will our future products be and how can we trust them to do the work. I don't pretend to be a very good developer, but I feel like I know what I'm doing most of the times, and still there are so many unknowns.
Reading notes
Wherify
is this a bad joke?
"GPS Locator FOR CHILDREN
Peace of Mind for Parents.
Cool for Kids.
Children have a natural urge to explore. Parents have a natural desire to know their children are safe.
So relax. Now you can have peace of mind 24 hours a day while your child is the high tech envy(?????) of the neighborhood!"
(quote from Wherify site)
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| Week 6 |
Reading Notes:
SmartHome
Home Heartbeat
HomeSeer
TMIO Fridge/Oven
Salton BeyondHome
I think we should have a smart-home class in ITP. A do-it-yourself version.
There are so many possibilities.
Of course some of the inventions sounds too much. How spoiled can we be? But still as a somewhat lazy person I wish I could have had a remote control in my phone that controls the windows, my stereo, my laptop and maybe feed the fish (and me?).
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| Week 5 |
Ping pong Project - Documentation
Building home-made security system
The inspiration for the project was a mouse that used to visit my place in the last few weeks.
I wanted to discover where it is coming from.
When telling about it to Ryan he told me about the same experience,
so at first we thought of having our 2 mice talking to each other.
But we figured out that it would be too difficult to show in class.
So we came up with a simple home-made security system that can scan an area and not just look at one direction.
In oreder to acheive the movement we hooked a webcamera to a stepper motor, so it will be able to spin accurately.
One Xport controls the camera movement by sending signals to the stepper motor.
The other Xport is a remote user that sends move camera commands in order to scan the area.
Both Xport are talking through a TCP Server that also runs a webcamera frame.
Scenario:
XPort 1 gets input from the motion sensor,
Send notification to Xport 2,
Freqout alerts Xport 2 that there has been an invasion
Xport 2 ask Xport 1 to start scanning the room -
sending left and right commands to the Xport1
Xport 1 moves the camera to the requested direction , plays a freqout
tune every few camera movements, to scare the intruder and most important take pictures of the new camera angle.
Once the whole area scan is completed, Xport 1 will notify Xport 2
Xport 2 will then decide to send "zone clear" notification or keep scanning
Xport 1 position the camera in the intitial state and waits again for an input from the motion sensor.
General Project scheme
Flowchart
Ryan's Wiring Diagram
Xport 1 code
Xport 2 code
More pictures on Ryan's Journal
Reading Notes:
Urban Tapestries,
UCSD ActiveCampus,
Sonic City,
FLIRT,
space annotation projects
I can see great value in using mobile devices in interactive projects, such as we do in ITP.
I certainly have a love-hate relationship with my cell phone.
Everyone who knows me a bit says that I use it all the times, but I also feel imprisoned by it.
I am alwyas available, or at least most of the times. I can't disappear.
If I do disappear it will just look odd to everyone.
But looking at the powerful new cell-phones, with all the java capabilities seems like a whole new horizon, a world of possibilities.
(I shouldn't write my blog at night).
There is so much to learn from the way people are using their phone, about their habits and culture.
Maybe a bit too intrusive, maybe a bit scary. But we have to realize that the world is heading
towards this direction and I feel that our
part as future intercative-designers (wannabe's) is to make sure people can trust their devices to protect the information they wish not to share.
Another challenge is to make these devices' new features more friendly and accessible to those who are afraid of technology, but use their mobile phone as frequent as I do.
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| Week 4 |
Ping pong Project - with Ryan
Experiment in building a home-made security system.
Scanning a room using a webcamera hooked to a stepper motor.
One Xport controls the camera motor and the other one is a remote control to the camera.
Both Xport are talking through a TCP Server that also runs a webcamera frame.
Scenario:
XPort 1 gets input from the motion sensor,
Send notification to Xport 2,
Freqout alerts Xport 2 that there has been an invasion
Xport 2 ask Xport 1 to start scanning the room -
sending left and right commands to the Xport1
Xport 1 moves the camera to the requested direction , plays a freqout
tune every few camera movements, to scare the intruder and most important take pictures of the new camera angle.
Once the whole area scan is completed, Xport 1 will notify Xport 2
Xport 2 will then decide to send "zone clear" notification or keep scanning
Xport 1 position the camera in the intitial state and waits again for an input from the motion sensor.
Important lesson 1. - Don't leave the wires of the serial ports from the xport running to the hex, even though the hex is not connected
Important lesson 2. - Don't initialize variables and then set TRISB value. They are getting back their initial value - 0
Important lesson 3. - Stepper motor needs a 12V constant power supply, any drop will make it move but not step... use a power supply bench and not a simple AC power supply.
This week was hard!
So many problems, so much bad luck! even lost my camera cable, so i can't post my pictures.
I just remembered why I left the programming and went to ITP. It can be so frustrating.
But So far the project is working.
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| Week 3 |
Reading Notes:
Window Display driven by SMS,
Blinkenlights ,
Alzado.net,
SMS/Public art/Public Speech links,
Caffeine online
To my opinion, public displays tends to be problematic.
There is a problem with letting everyone the right to "show" their opinion in a public space without filter and behind anonymity.
We live in a time where everyone is looking for an audinece and a stage, and the internet is a perfect place to get that.
However I feel the rules should be changed when talking about public spaces displays.
There must be a way to limit the amount of garbage that is broadcasts. People might think i am trying to limit the freedom of speech,
but I feel it's a must- when you enter an internet website and you don't like the content, you just leave it,
but what hapens if you're on the street...
Solutions - either a gatekeeper will check the inputs before broadcasting, or having to identify yourself as the author of the message.
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| Week 2 |
XPORT adventure
Soldering the Xport to the board was a lot of fun.
The best part was to see it works...
Here is a link to the configuration notes
Readings - Virtually Living Together - Konrad Tollmar, Stefan Junestrand, Olle Torgny
Reading about the design approaches at the beggining of the article, I was really anticipating
to see the end-products that would evolve from this process.
Frankly I was a bit disappointed with the results.
It seems like they made a great effort to see what is missing in people life and try
to come with a good solution or enhance an expreince, but they turned out prototyping
products that are neither useful nor interesting enough to be considered art (to my humble opinion).
For me, knowing when a person is at home or not seems a bit out of place.
In a way, being far away from my home and my family, I think these ambient
emotional communication devices are amplifying my lonliness and distance...
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| Week 1 |
Reading -
THE COMING AGE OF CALM TECHNOLOGY - Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown
THE UC ERA
An age in which a plumber must acquire a computer science degree.
Whenever I try to imagine this new world - the UC era - I keep thinking about maintenance. Can we trust technology to be as stable as a pair of shoes or a writing pen?
I guess we will be facing new issues, and thus new professions will be required.
Fixing a broken pipe in the house should be coordinated with the rest of the appliances talking to it..
One idea that disturbed me in the article is the Inner office windows.
Working for 3 years in an office with no windows at all (my happy hi-tech days) besides this "great" inner window (facing another no-window office) does make me unease.
Obviously, the article isn't claiming that inner windows suppose to be a substitute for real windows, but for me it raises some privacy issues.
First of all - if you want to feel connected to the outside world, you just have to open your door.
"The ability to locate and be located by people passing by" - do we really want that? Do we want to be accessible? All the times?
calm?
In my opinion, before we start thinking about calm technology, we should establish trust in technology. Coming from technical background, the thought of a smart house, built by some programmers sitting in no-windows space, terrifies me.
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