Midterm Ideas and Serial Communication

Wednesday, October 18, 2017 2:09 AM

This week we began learning about Serial communication. I knew what Serial communication was but never did the programming for it on a micro-controller or at a low level like this. This relates to other things I've done with USB peripherals I am happy to learn more about how it works. In particular, the ability to send and receive Serial messages with Python opens up a whole new world of project ideas for me.

Questions

I have some questions about Serial communication. First, what is the Serial channel doing when it is not sending a message? The voltage on the wire will be interpreted as either high or low. How does it differentiate between the absence of communication and a series of null bytes?

The second question has to do with communication errors. How important is it for the code to be robust to communication errors? How common are they? What are the programming best practices to minimize the impact of errors?

Business Cards

Tuesday, October 17, 2017 12:49 AM

Our final Visual Language assignment is to design business or personal cards. It happens I already had personal cards but I wanted to update my design to incorporate what I have learned in this class.

The main goal of my cards is to provide some interaction and enjoyment to the people I give them to. Usually cards are boring and are tossed into a drawer somewhere shortly after they are received. Often they are given out to communicate status or corporate identity. I want my cards to be different. I want to communicate my ability to be creative and engage people in a unique way. And I do that by designing connect the dots puzzles for the backside of my cards.

Improved Model and Final Project Ideas

Sunday, October 15, 2017 11:02 AM

Improved 3D Speaker Case

Previously I designed and printed a 3D speaker case to use in my Physical Computing class. The speaker case worked well but I made a design error in Rhino. The front opening for the speaker was smaller than I intended it to be. All I had to do is make the opening larger and print out a new one. Sounds simple right? How could this possibly go wrong?

The redesign in Rhino was straightforward:

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Next, I proceed to the 3D printer. This time I used the Ultimaker 2+ printer with a 0.6mm nozzle. Previously I used the Ultimaker 2+ Extended printer with a 0.4mm nozzle. Since my model isn't particularly detailed I thought I could save myself some time printing with a 0.6mm nozzle printer and lower resolution settings.

Instructable Video Rough Cut

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 11:20 PM

After much perseverance our group completed the video editing in Adobe Premiere.

This is a rough cut of our final video. There are some transition issues and we need to record some more narration, but the general idea is there. Enjoy!

User Experience and Interactivity

Tuesday, October 10, 2017 10:35 PM

More reading and Physical Computing experiments!

Sketching the User Experience

Sketching the User Experience, by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton, is a book about design techniques that are useful for user experience design. The main idea is that sketching is an effective tool for designers to quickly develop, communicate, and record ideas. The book first explains the importance of design techniques, and then goes through a variety tools a designer can use. Some are obvious, like a simple quick sketch, but others are not approaches I would have thought of on my own.

The book is clear that reading about sketching user experience is not the same actually going through the process sketching user experience. To explore this, I went through the book and thought about how I could incorporate this into my behaviors.

I (almost) always have my phone with me, and I have Evernote on my phone. Evernote has some neat features for storing hand drawings that I don’t use very often. I thought it would be a good idea to explore this and see how easily I can use it to sketch a design.

ITP Winter Show 2017

Tuesday, October 10, 2017 9:12 PM

This past week we learned about design composition, and our assignment was to create a poster for ITP's Winter Show. At the end of every semester ITP hosts a show of students' work. The digital and print media advertising the show is designed a student. ITP faculty select one poster design out of many submitted by students. Later this week I am going to submit my design as a potential poster to be used for this winter's show.

Poster Inspiration

I got the idea for this poster before the assignment was given. My fellow ITP student, Max Horwich, posted this Facebook photo he took of himself after building something in the ITP shop:

/images/itp/visual_language/week5/max.jpg

I think this is an amazing photo.

Instructable Filming

Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:20 PM

This week we did the filming for our instructable video on making a laser cut box! Many thanks to my group members Yeonhee and Caleb. Before we started I was pretty apprehensive about filming but we worked thoughtfully and efficiently through each stage of our filming. There are about 9 scenes in our video so we did a lot of lugging camera equipment around. We even took everything to Canal Plastics to film in their store. The store owners were kind enough to let us film there.

In total we have at least 40 to 50 GB of video. We did multiple takes for each section, sometimes using two cameras at the same time. We also created two laser cut boxes, because the assembly step involves using acrylic welding and obviously that can only be done once. Two boxes made the success of each shot less critical.

Experiments With Sound

Tuesday, October 3, 2017 12:20 PM

Upcycling a Speaker

A year ago someone gave me a birthday card that played a song when the card was opened. As I was interested in learning more about circuits, I took apart the card and saved the electrical components for a time when I could dissect them and learn more about how they work. Last week we learned about sound in our physical computing class, so it seemed like a good time to put the inexpensive speaker to good use.

To upcycle the speaker I rewired it to give it red and black wires for the speaker's positive and negative terminals and a header pin to go into a breadboard. I also built a 3D printed case as an assignment for my 3D printing class.

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Color Palette

Sunday, October 1, 2017 11:12 PM

This week we learned about the use and importance of color in design. Our assignment is to create a color palette that represents us and then use it in several compositions.

This is the color palette I came up with. The primary color is #882222 which is currently the specific shade of red used in my blog's side menu. I happen to like the shade of red a lot. The other colors were selected using Google's Color Selector Tool. I tend to not like the color blue that much but I thought it did compliment the reds quite well so I decided to stick with it.

First 3D Print

Sunday, October 1, 2017 8:13 PM

My first (mostly) successful 3D print! It is a speaker case for a small speaker I upcycled from a Hallmark greeting card. I intend to use this for my Physical Computing class.

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Here's how I made it! First, I measured the speaker dimensions with digital calipers and sketched my idea on paper.