Highlights

Photos of final results

 

Notes - Back to Milmoe.com

Introduction

We will be investigating multiplicity by working with less expensive PIC controllers, networking, and more output vs. inputs as in PC1.

In class we discussed "What is interaction?" Is a book interactive? I argued that a book is interactive because it is an interface between you and the author. You interacted with the author (although in a limited way) by choosing/buying/reading the book. You may tell others about it which may increase the sales of the book, etc. However, if the author is diseased he/she may not be so interactive. I still argue that anything with an interface is interactive and therefore just about everything is interactive.

We were assigned an article which asked "What is interactivity?" and it defined interaction as a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak... books don't listen, and they can't speak. Again I would argue that with a living author your actions (buying or not buying a book) speak in some small way over time, but I guess its not too interactive. And certainly you don't look to books for interaction.

 

Last week I went to Burning Man... I tried to sum up the experience in a way that related to my work here and I figure this is as good a place as any to write it down...

The thing that struck me was how everyone communicated face to face. There were no phones, radios were not very effective because of the limited bandwidth available, pagers were not really in use, and there was too much sand/dust in the air to really allow you to use a traditional. handheld device anyway. There was also a total lack of advertising. And yet for a week it was Nevada's 5th largest city.

Hmm... more on that later.

First Assignment

Critique of an existing project...

I'm not sure if I can critique one of my own projects, but I will anyway, just to keep the kissing booth journal going. (I set it up at Burning Man)

It seems that there are a couple of possible ways to consider this issue. One is where two people are interacting through technology (like, I would argue, the kissing booth.) The other is technology that responds to the actions of the user... the presence of the user changes the piece. (Like the wooden mirror.) The trick is that the wooden mirror does not think or speak... so in this case only projects that allow communication or a connection between two users are truly interactive.

I also feel that a piece does not require "technology" as most people think of it to be interactive. Electronics are just part of the tool set that have not been fully realized by artists due to the learning curve.

Martí Guixé

The artist Martí Guixé designed a piece I would call interactive. It was the interior of a store in Milan for shoemaker Camper. The store needed to open quickly but the materials were not going to arrive from Japan for a couple of weeks (If I remember the story correctly) so they hired him to create an interior with no time and no budget.

He stacked the shoe boxes inside the middle of the store and covered the tops with wood counter. Then placed the demo shoes on top. As shoppers purchased the shoes they were given a 4" square on the "Camper" khaki tan painted walls and a "Camper" red pen to write with. As people wrote the walls they changed color, going from tan to red over the course of a few weeks.

It had the least espensive interior and yet it was the top selling store. And I would argue quite interactive since the user's presence changes the look of the store and allows them to communicate with other users.

 

The "Burning Kiss" (Click photo for larger image)

I had to strap it to this scaffold/gateway structure at the Disorientation camp site to keep it from falling down. I know it looks a bit sad, but keep in mind that the plywood folds to the size of a quarter sheet and then is wrapped in the black tarp forming a pretty small package... which I had to fit in a pickup with 5 other people's stuff from San Francisco.

I left out the curtain for the kisser since people at Burningman are much less concerned about such things. The bill changer was replaced with a NYC cab style flipping drawer so that the kisser and kissee could exchange gifts and stay anonymous. (Burningman works on a gift economy.)

I didn't have time and lacked the knowledge on how to get kissers to sign up in advance this time so I had to ask people to volunteer. I didn't have much luck since the people showing up were more in a mood wander around.

Maybe next year.

Tragedy

Everything is on hold since the World Trade Center collapse. I walked home across the Manhattan bridge with Tom Igoe, the professor of this course. We tried to take it all in and make some sense of where things are headed and what impact this will have on the world.

New York (and the world for that matter) is suddenly a different place.

It's all over the news...

Programming the Pic

We had our introduction to the PIC Chip. It's kind of like the BX-24 we used last semester in Physical Computing except that it's cheaper, faster, and lower level. The programming language reminds me of assembly which I have not used since I was in computer camp at about 14 years old. (Yes, I said computer camp. I've been a geek for a really long time.) Anyhow, you have to build much of what the BX-24 provides, such as:

-voltage regulation
-an oscilator

The BX has other nicities like more RAM, a more sophisticated basic language (the BX uses an interpreter instead of code compiled to assembly) but for most of what we're doing the PIC is just fine.

Using the PIC

I decide to modify my "Milmoe Box" to include a programming cable directly in to the chip, but somehow managed to randomly assign the wire colors last semester... so after a lot of re-soldering I got things to work for the most part. I decided to do this because otherwise you need to remove the PIC chip and insert it in to the programmer which runs off the parallel port (BX-24 programs out the serial port) and then reinsert it in to you breadboard, which gets very old when you are trying to rapidly debug code in the middle of the night. And if you bend the pins in the process you'll be displeased.

We use Codesigner Lite as a text editor, it happens to be integrated rather nicely with the PIC Basic Pro compiler. It's a reasonably decent environment, but does require a lot of non-heirarchical steps which are unintuitive. It would be nice if it operated more like a wizard for those who are not super geeky. But then you can't get much more geeky than programming microcontrollers.

Order of operations:

This is more a note to myself so you may want to skip over this unless you are programming a PIC.

Write the code and compile it. Launch the programmer.

View the configuration window
- select "XT" which means you are using an external christal. (but of course...) HS is for high speed and RC is for resister/capacitor... I guess you can make a clock out of a resister/capacitor combo, but I'll hack that out another day.

Load the program. (.hex) and while we're at it here are the other extensions:

.pdp - this is the human coded text
.hex - your code in hexidecimal bytes
.asn - assemble compiled code
.mac - macros

If all goes well and the chip is connected to the programmer correctly it will tell you it's going to erase the chip and then you'll see a couple of progress bars and then the chip is ready to rock.

The Assignment

"The purpose of this assignment is to design and prototype an interactive sculpture or device that embodies a set of changing data obtained a network. You can use sound, light, motion, or smell. " here it is in detail.

Part of the deal is to create works where the user is not using a keyboard, mouse, or monitor... and I'm all about that.

And it's a group project. I'm working with Heather Delaney and Betsy Seder.

A brief word about group projects...

When you enter a group project at ITP you are going to work with people who you can teach and who have something to teach you. You all bring skills to the table and want to complete the project having improved certain skills. If you take the approach that everyone focus on your strengths you all leave with a better, more competitive product, but you will not learn as much.

My goal with this project is to be sure that we all get a chance to spread the workload and get a sence of accomplishment having created something interesting and having learned a great deal in the process. I'm intentinally leaving the other members to do the work I could do myself, and I'll help if possible when they get stuck. I'm going to try to do a better job of collaborating, and learn all I can about electronics which I don't know that much about.

The Project

We decide to do our project about flow, balance, equilibrium. Inputs and outputs, particles, volumes of stored liquids, fluids. Something that gives the viewer a sence of mass and fluid liquid bulk.

Makers of the PIC Chip:
Microchip (clever name, eh?)

The first assignment.

Debugging the PIC

We learned how to debug the pic by sending serial out to an LCD screen or to Zterm or whatever it's called on the PC.

 

Motors

Servo motors - They are most accurate in their movements, but typically only have 180 degrees of motion. Usually pretty expensive and processor intensive. (You have to send the servo a pulse signal to tell it what angle it sould be at.)

Stepper motors - Usually have 5-6 leads and require you to "step" them around in a circle. They can move quite accurately, but are a bit of a pain in the butt since you usually need a darlington transistor array to get them working. (the transistor array alows you to trigger voltage from another power supply.) Speed and direction are controlled by changing the order of the leads.

DC motors - cheap, fast, but without a gear head can have high speed, but low torque. DC motors are usually conrolled through a relay and H-Bridge.

On second thought, just refer to this.

Some note we took from our group meeting on 10/5/01.

I was starting to feel like we were not all on the same page and we had a couple of variations on the pudge that were being bantied about. I wanted us to focus the meeting so I suggested we write down some assumptions and items that were in question.

ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE PUDGE
Latex pudge: the sample or possible thicker
Prototype - closed system / final - open system
Rigid circular tubing for the arms
Phosphorescent particles and
Therefore a dim room
Hanging from ceiling
Motors
Support structure ( for prototype)
Adhesive bands/ clips
5 pudgelets
breadboards
relays
input will be a bunch of number that will be created by a program that we build.

CONSIDERATIONS
curve the arms
surface treatment to the pudge and its pudgelets
a pudge contractor - possibly by cables and turnbuckles, possibly a more rigid metal structure with joints
pullies

SOME of the stuff we need to figure out:
Basically everything. (Oh Betsy... it's not that bad. -A)

MORE SPECIFICALLY:
How much will the water weigh
Will the water be heavy enough to pudge the pudge?
A robust and reliable latex adhesive.
What motors do we use

Other notes

We decide to seperate the central Pudge into 5 sub-Pudges

Book recommendation: Creating Holiday Displays - Animatronics, Gerald Susman

Robot Builder's Bonanza

Present Thematic Diagrams

Here is what we presented:

The Pudge: Technical Notes

Data about people entering and leaving Manhattan is translated in to fluctuations in the size and shape of the Pudge according to the position of the arms and the total volume of water.

Data will enter the system through the internet. This information will be transferred over TCP/IP to a simple database server. The database server will pass serial data to the Pudge parser, a pic chip that will translate the data in to a serial TTL signal. This signal will pass to the two motor controllers. The first motor controller will raise and lower each of the five arms by powering motors connected to the arms through a line and pulley system. The motion of the line will trigger two Hall effect magnetic sensors indicating to the system that the arm has reached itís maximum or minimum height. This will allow the Pudge to self calibrate to fit the envelope of the data over time. The other motor controller will regulate the volume of liquid by pumping water in or out of the Pudge. See diagram.

The Feedback:

-Too complicated... try just the Pudge and no Pudglets.
-Think about how the pressure of one bladder might affect the others.
-Water will not flow in to/out of the pudglets without water in the system if they are rigid.
-What if we had sharp objects below the Pudge to create tension.

The prototype: The other 11th of the month...

On 10/11/01 (Love that date) we build a prototype of one fifth of the Pudge. The result was humorous, but inappropriate. (If you squint at our diagram you may notice a certain resemblance to a certain male body part) And more importantly we were having no luck finding the data we wanted. There were no figures on movement in and out of the city over the course of the day, let alone in real time.

And we all had a rather off-putting feeling about the data and what it meant. The Pudge was an interesting output device, but did traffic flow really represent the tension felt by being trapped on the island of Manhattan with only a few bridges and tunnels available to millions of people? Does the number of people in the city really affect my own level of tension?

Our assumptions had not panned out. Time for an overhaul...

 

Intro to Site Player

We began to learn all about Site Player. We'd learn about the Tini server, but they are out of stock for a long long time. (Tini runs Java)

Basically someone created a web server that runs on a chip. Pretty insane. You request data from it over TCP/IP and it replies.

Burning some clutch...

We were none too psyched about our idea at this point. So we had a LONG lunch until we came up with a better idea.

The NEW idea

The sounds on the street are a source of disruption to the ambient noise in the rooms we live and work in, sometimes penetrating many layers until it disrupts our rhythm and concentration. After a while it becomes part of the ambient noise we tune out until it changes again, creating another disruption.

This piece consists of 8 water filled glass spheres that hang in a circular mobile configuration. Each sphere is balanced by an independent counter weight and connected to its neighbors through loose hanging pieces of latex tubing. Pipes from each sphere point up towards the ceiling and show the shared waterline of the system. One of the spheres has a device that puts energy in to the system.

This input sphere is raised or lowered in reaction to noise coming from outside on the street. A loud sustained sound will cause the
sphere to rapidly bounce up and down. This change in height creates a ripple of shockwaves throughout the system as the other spheres fill and drain water until the system calms down. If the noise continues it becomes "normal" and the system tunes it out. If the noise stops suddenly the system agitates again in reaction.

(this part is up for discussion until we get a chance to test it.) The opposite sphere rocks steadily up and down at a constant rate of
about 1 beat per minute, approximately the same as the viewers pulse. As shockwaves pass through the system they are transferred to this opposite sphere causing "noise" to disrupt its normal pattern of motion.

Meeting with Tom

We met with Tom and discussed the new idea. He respected our decision to shift gears and liked the new direction we were taking. As I like to say (a quote stollen from a Japanese designer from a conference I went to) "Fail often and quickly" you learn more from mistakes than successes. Accept failures, learn from them and move on. If you are not failing than you are not learning or challenging yourself.

We also had questions about how to drive the structure, how complicated to make the sound, and what ciruits and motors to use.

 

Another presentation

Feedback was basically, we can't really understand/predict the behavior of the system until we see it.

We were ordered to get a catalog from Small Parts.

New Thematic:

Click diagram for larger image.

Final Presentation of Mid-Term Project

Notes to come

Sketches of fulcrums

Fulcrum consists of (from top down) aircraft cable w/aluminum crimp, steel D-ring, a chrome plated brass sink tube with a D shaped cross section taken out, angle iron cut and ground to a knife edge, and a U clamp holding the steel mobile rod.

Click the photos for larger images.

Above photographs (c) 2001 Betsy Seder (used with permission)