Sociable Objects - Glow That LED

For this assignment, Amanda and I each built a circuit with an Arduino, an XBee radio, a potentiometer, and several LEDs. They were paired such that adjusting the potentiometer on one brightens or dims an LED on the other.

The assignment was based heavily on the exercises in Chapter 6 of Tom Igoe's book Making Things Talk (amazon).

The Arduino code is online here.

cell phone signal strength mapping

it would be interesting to have a map that told me where in the city my cell signal was actually strongest. perhaps a phone or similarly-capable device could be hacked to simply record signal strength and location (determined by accelerometer (???) and triangulation from cell towers)

presence monitoring at ITP

in class today there was discussion of various notification systems for ITP students about the state of particular systems on the floor (the foosball table, free food, etc). text messages provide a pretty easy way to do this, but the system would need a way of knowing not to bother notifying people who were not on the floor

since access to the floor happens (almost?) exclusively through the elevator and adjacent stairwell, it might be feasible to use this bottleneck to make note of people entering and leaving. Rob mentioned previous attempts to have someone swipe a card, but it seems an E(lectronic )A(rticle )S(urveillance) system similar to those used in retail stores to protect against shoplifters might work well. the units cost one or two thousand dollars new, but they've been around for a while so maybe older/cheaper models are available. then each student could carry an RFID or similarly purposed chip in his/her wallet, and the scanners could note when that person passes through (without, of course, making the noise)

a pretty powerful API could be created for the system that other students could build on. it would be useful to be able to query the system about whether a certain person was on the floor or not (this might avoid the privacy concerns that people had with BlueWay), and individuals could sign up for the notifications that interested them.

Binary Counter

As a side project, I put together a circuit that counts the number of times a switch has been pressed in binary. It displays the count using a row of six LEDs, and was built/written using the Arduino Button and Loop examples as a starting point. The Arduino code is online here.

Physical Computing - Lab 2

Lab from: http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Labs/DigitalInOut


Prepare the breadboard -



Add a Digital Input (a switch) -



Add Digital Outputs (LEDs) -



Program the Arduino -







Get Creative -

Physical Computing - Lab 1

Lab from: http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Labs/Electronics

Part 1 -
The voltage between the power and the ground rows on the breadboard was approximately 4.92V, with about 12V coming from the adapter socket.






Part 2 -
The voltage across the first resistor was approximately 3V. The voltage across the LED was approximately 1.9V. These do have a sum that is approximately the total voltage in the circuit.





Part 3 -
The voltage across the first LED was approximately 2.52V and the voltage across the second LED was approximately 2.48V. These are nearly the same, as expected. Three LEDs in series do light, but they are less bright because each receives only approximately 1.6V.





Part 4 -
In parallel, the LEDs each have the total voltage of approximately 4.9V (4.94V, 4.94V, and 4.92V were measured). The amperage drawn by the LEDs was approximately 20 milliamps.







Part 5 -
The potentiometer drew between 0V and 2.98V, depending on the setting.

potential project idea

from Jan Chipchase's blog Future Perfect:

The everyday places that we linger will start to take on a new relevance with the widespread adoption of devices equipped with proximate wireless connectivity - Bluetooth, RFID, WiFi, ..., when the simple act of lingering creates opportunities for meaningful data exchange.

http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2008/05/the_small_crowd.html