PComp

Curious Light -- Multicolored Pumpkin

 

Katherine Moriwaki's Accessory Design course

From Katherine Moriwaki to her advisees:

Dear Faculty Advisees, 

It's almost registration time and I wanted to make you aware of a NEW class that I will be co-teaching this Spring. It's not on the books, so neither I nor other faculty would have been talking about it, but it's really cool! Basically we are developing high-tech handbags for the Korean luxury brand MCM. Please see the description below. There is prize money involved and each team will have designs selected for sample production! If fashion and technology isn't your passion, it's not a problem, but please let your classmates who would be interested know! There is room for six CDT students, and I think it would be great to get some computational and embedded technology into these bags!

Best, 
Katherine

PUFD 3271 A: Accessory Design: CRN 2758 (Monday 12-2:40)

Listed instructor: Aneta Genova

While other institutions have only just begun to think about how technological advances can enhance the study of fashion and product design, Parsons and The New School have made such connections a reality. By collaborating with a brand such as MCM Worldwide we will challenge our Fashion Design and Technology students to utilize such innovations to create technological advanced accessories.

The project:  Parsons’ students will be challenged to look at the intersections of technology and luxury, addressing issues of aesthetics, functionality and innovation within the context of design.  MCM will donate materials (accessories) to be deconstructed for use in this project.

The Programs: AAS & BFA Fashion Design, BFA/MFA Communication Design Technology and BFA Product Design students will form teams under the guidance of the following Parsons faculty:Katherine Moriwaki, School of Art, Media and Technology, Aneta Genova, School of Fashion and Rama Chorpash, School of Constructed Environments. Students will research the fields of design technology and fabric innovation while addressing themes of utility, versatility & multi-functional use within the design process.

Accessories have an enormous potential for the smart integration of functional technologies to amplify the consumer’s experience by using the accessory. Thus the MCM product line can be extended with creative explorations of ‘smart’ accessories that are luxurious through added technologies. A user-centered design approach will examine functionalities, the perception and the rate of adoption of various technologies by the consumers.

Prize: $10,000 to be divided as follows:

First prize team receives $5,000 to be divided amongst team members

Two runner-up teams will receive $2,500 to be divided amongst team members (total $5,000)

All three teams will have their designs selected for sample production

The cloud research

Nabaztag This is a bunny/creature that reads data from the Internet and uses voice to tell you the information http://www.nabaztag.com/en/index.html Scan toaster The smart toaster is a scanner that prints informationsuch as weather and news on your toast http://www.reghardware.com/2008/09/11/wacky_toaster/ Ambient devices Ambient devices is a company that produces ambient objects that give informationto the user working inn theeriphery http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/products.html

LED Matrix Research

This week our group is doing research on LED Matrix. Here are three projects that I wan to use as my precendents.

First one is TENORI-ON (2004) by Toshio Iwai, curated by MoMA. Promoted by Yamaha as “a digital musical instrument for the twenty-first century,” the TENORI-ON’s “visible music” interface is suitable for both serious musicians and beginners to electronic music.

 

The second project is "Duality" by ART+COM from Germany. It has a LED matrix installed under a glass floor, which difuses the LED light. Passersby trigger the installation that interplays between solid and liquid, virtual and real, light and water: Their footsteps generate virtual waves that transform to real water waves in the pond.

The third project is an interactive LED Coffee Table that's featured on SparkFun. It is a four-way multi-player pong.

Daylight/Nightime Catch ball

This inside of this wiffle ball contains the circuit wire wrapped along with some clear glass pieces to give weight to the ball so it can have more momentum. The sensor at the top is successful at adjusting the light of the ball with natural light that is in a given room. At this stage the ball is throwable except it is very fragile and must be thrown lightly for the time being. 

Evil Monkey and the Cloud meets Arduino

Below are the eyes that will eventually be implanted in a monkey stuffed animal. Unfortunately, I ripped the leg off of my programmable unijunction transistor, so the implant has been delayed, until I can get another in the mail! :(

The super-huggable monkey that I'll turn evil... once I replace my hard-to-find programmable unijunction transistor:

Arduino meets the cloud

Facebook friends' status updates via Arduino:

A twitter-reading robot, through a couple of iterations. Personally, I like the look and feel of their first prototype more than the final version...

A burgler alarm that tweets when someone breaks into your house:

http://www.kelvinsthunderstorm.com/2009/02/twitter-burglar-alarm/

 

Motors Precedence

The first project I found is something that's been at the back of my mind since I came to Parsons: an Arduino-controlled CNC machine!  I was disappointed that there was no CNC machine in the equipment shops here, since that used to be my go-to tool for prototyping, but (maybe) it would be possible for some students to build one themselves:

 

More here

Another project on the opposite end of the motor-use spectrum is an installation by the artist Zimoun, who often uses basic motors attached to simple devices like wires and boxes to create really interesting effects.  Here's one of his works - I can't embed the video but it's in the link:

23 Prepared DC Motors

I think this is really nice because it shows how you can do something very effective with very little wiring and materials, if you just consider the properties and values of the materials and shapes you choose.

And for a fun one, there's the ArtBot - supposedly it's for kids but I think it's great for everyone.

 

kids drawbot from finkbuilt on Vimeo.

Instructions here

 

 

Musical Examples of Arduino

#1 Piano Gloves

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Piano Gloves is a prototype design by scott garner that enables users to play a full size piano without any piano present. the design is composed of two digitally enhanced gloves that use arduino and processing to track the player’s movements and create the corresponding piano notes. the user puts on the gloves and then plays the piano on any flat surface, such as a desk or table. the gloves are spatially aware and can know what notes the user is intending to play. the gloves are in the early stages of development and garner says he has ‘a lot of ideas for new features on both the software and hardware side of things.’

Piano Gloves from Scott Garner on Vimeo.

#2 AIRduino Guitar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The idea here is to build a wearable virtual guitar that is to be controlled with two hands much like playing Air Guitar. The aim is to get the feeling of playing a real guitar. The AIRduino Guitar is made of one glove and one stick. The glove is used to set the tone and the stick to trigger the sound.

 

#3 Twinkle Tartiflette

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Twinkle Tartiflette is an interactive artwork, using various LilyPad modules connected with conductive thread. It combines words, image and sound into an interactive experience, brought to life by touching the words with a stylus.

More introductions:
 http://rainycatz.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/twinkle-tartiflette-an-arduino-driven-interactive-wordmusic-artwork/

Curious Light (Second Iteration): Interactive Jewelry

I chose to pursue the jewelry prototype for this week's project, and set to work finding a way to integrate the circuits into the structure of the rings better, eliminating as much wire as possible and hopefully finding a ring that would allow a more diffused and interesting light effect. As luck would have it, I found a ring with clear plastic "crystals" laid out like a flower, which gave me the perfect opportunity for some pretty refracted light and a place to hide the LEDs themselves (of the smaller 3mm variety in order to fit). The crystals and flower motif, while a bit tacky in my eyes, actually fits well with my original role for the product as a fun jewelry item for young girls in elementary and middle school.

I had also bought another bracelet to coordinate with the new ring, but decided that no matter what you did to minimize wire and obtrusiveness, there would always have to be wires connecting the person's rings to their bracelet, so I decided to try to keep the entire system contained in the rings. In order to do this I needed a smaller battery, so I tried a 3V coin battery; unfortunately the voltage was not powerful enough to power all three super-bright LEDs that I had in position, (and it didn't really fit anywhere without sticking out noticeably) so I had to go back to the drawing board. I bought a second coin battery to up the power, but also decided to try hearing aid batteries after sleuthing out their voltage (1.4V, conspicuously missing form the packaging). By strapping 6 of these little guys together, I was able to power the string of LEDs through two or three rings with adequate brightness.

Additional photos and video documentation are below.

 

 

 

 

Cloud [Physical] Computing

Example 1: Twitballoon—a Twitter Trend Visualizer

Twitballoon is controlled by an Arduino, permanently performing Twitter searches for a predefined keyword. If it finds a tweet the balloon is released a bit and lifts up. Over time it is pulled down again. So the height of the balloon reflects the activity of that keyword on Twitter. It is much easier to understand if you watch the video:

TwitBalloon from tinkerlog on Vimeo.

Example 2: Arduino + mapme.at + Hardware Hack = Weasley Clock

John McKerrell built this fun project integrating hardware hacking with talking to "the Cloud" in order to make his own personal version of the Weasely family geo-clock from Harry Potter. The Arduino makes an HTTP request to a mapme.at which returns John's location in JSON; the code he wrote parses this JSON and translates it into movements of the clock's hands.

Very cool.

Example 3: Nimbits

Nimbits is a free, social data logging service. It provides web services to feed and store time series data (such as a changing temperature) into "Data Points" online. As your data it fed up into Nimbits you'll be able to use its many online data processing services, perform calculations, and receive alerts. You can also pull your data down into any connected system. Today, as values are recorded into Nimbits users see their changes in Spreadsheets, Visio Diagrams, on Facebook, Instant Messages, or using our free windows desktop interface. Software developers also use our free and open source SDK to write their own interfaces to the Nimbits Engine.

This particular article describes how you can now feed data up into the Nimbits Data Logger cloud, complete with diagrams of the circuit and the Arduino code! This other article also discusses the implementation with a fair amount of code.