Tag: Arduino

Posted on in Arduino, Design, Physical Prototyping, Programming

Intergalactic Burger

Group theme: burger

Challenge: build a physical prototyping that will react to a Processing visualisation 

Three hours well spent on how to get more in depth with Processing and David was very helpful in assisting our group with the Processing code. While my team mates were building the physical burger controller, I did took the task of coding. I learned how to load one static image as a background and one float image and afterwards how to code this image as a an array that will react to our controller. It was pretty fun, but our subject was trivial. Therefore, our project resulted in a trivial, only for fun work. 


Posted on in Art, Design, Programming

Processing Magic

Learning about computational creativity was one of the main reasons why I decided to started the studies in Interaction Design. It is such an unexplored area and generative art can reach immersive levels never imagined before. Having this week dedicated to Processing experimentation is surely a personal delight. 

David Cuartialles hold a guided exercise on how to creatively use Processing and I was happy I was able to follow actively and solve the little issues on my way successfully. At this point I really felt my knowledge built in Programming I serving me as a support for using this software. Even though the differences between Java/Processing and JavaScript are very high, I do feel it offers a starting point if you wish to learn this computational environment. 

We did have fun and we also did built a timer telling us how many seconds and minutes are left until we fry. We also created some cool randomly generated circles that implied coding a lot of arrays and variables, but the result was nice and fun I told myself. 

Posted on in Design

Cat Meat: A first encounter with Arduino and physical prototyping

screenshot 2019-01-28 at 11.17.46

Ever since one of my acquaintances informed me that he started working on a new project consisting of a robotic arm that can hold a video camera and move in synchronisation with a CGI, all of this possible with this innovative piece of hardware called Arduino, I was eager to find out more about what it is all about. 

After a thorough introduction to general information and basic electronics tricks involving the board, Arduino Creator and different cables and buttons, we were given the challenge of the day: create an external controller using only cardboard, copper and connect it to a video game of your choice. I look to my classmate and I confess that I do not even see this possible. 

Me and Weronika team up with a product design student and we try to ideate for a few minutes in the hopes that we will clear out some of the confusion. We decided that our little experiment will be conducted on a funny Super Mario like video game, only that the main character is a cat. 

We chose actions walking forward, walking backwards and jumping and my teammates started cutting out cardboard in different shapes. I had the example from David for how to create a button on the Arduino board so I have edited it to my desired place on the board, copied it two more times and created two additional buttons. I have defined it in the code, creating a button for up key which is the jumping action, one for key right which is for walking forward and key left for walking backwards. We started placing copper on the different shapes and place the cables connected to the board. 

Test time: we were so excited and so curious at the same time if our experiment will actually be successful! We started the game and we started touching the shapes together corresponding to the desired action. Nothing happened, our character was not moving. “You have to touch exactly the two pieces of copper”, Johannes told us. We tried again and the character was now alive. 

I can not possible explain my fascination at the moment, I felt like a small kid in a candy shop. Suddenly I could see all types of interactions coming alive and so many opportunities. It is truly fascinating the way computer science, electronics and simple craft came together and created this little magic trick. But I should realise: there is still so much more to learn!