Punch the Alien!
For our final project, Sara and I built an alien head that responds to punches. When you hit the alien, injuries appear in a Processing sketch that correspond to the place where you hit it. It is constructed from a…
Texting with Giants
For the media controller project, Matt Epler, Sara Al-Bassam and I designed a giant phone button pad for typing out old-school texts. The phone buttons were constructed from plexiglass, cardboard, and foam. The plexi provided a hard surface as a…
Serial Duplex
For this lab, I learned how to read input from multiple sensors and translate the serial data via two different methods. The first one is called the Punctuation method. Each time the data is read, it is punctuated with a…
In Your Face
I’ve spent some time observing how people interact with video chat. My dad loves his iPad, and is constantly bugging me to FaceTime with him. He never lets me know ahead of time, so he always ends up calling me…
Serial Output
In preparation for the media controller project, I had to learn how to transmit serial data from Arduino to another program. For this lab, I wired up an FSR on the Arduino board, as I have several times before. The…
Finger Fencing!
For my “stupid pet trick” assignment, I built a finger fencing game. It’s a really simple variation on the tone lab assignment, wherein the FSRs are sewn onto the index fingers of a pair of gloves. This idea originated with…
To Servo with Love
This lab demonstrates how to manipulate a servo motor using sensor input. As force is added to the FSR, it causes the servo motor to rotate. The more force is applied, the more the motor rotates along its 180 degree…
Is this the real life, or is it just fantasy?
My fantasy device is a synesthesia simulator. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which one sensory experience leads to the stimulation of another. There are several variations, including ones where people can hear colors or taste linguistic sounds. This leads…
Haunted by Voltage Dividers
I am haunted by voltage dividers. These little buggers were the focus of my electronics lab in college for an entire semester, and I’m sorry to say that class made me hate electronics for a long time. Years later, the…
Interactivity: MoMA vs. Crawford
Crawford suggests that the heart of interactivity is a conversation between two beings, wherein both speak, think, and listen. This is obviously an approximation when we are talking about objects. Even the most advanced AI isn’t really “thinking,” but rather…