{"id":294,"date":"2015-10-29T00:12:30","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T00:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zoebachman.net\/itp\/?p=294"},"modified":"2015-10-29T01:18:41","modified_gmt":"2015-10-29T01:18:41","slug":"pcomp-wk-7-midterm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zoebachman.net\/itp\/?p=294","title":{"rendered":"PComp, Wk 7: Midterm"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is essentially a reconstruction of the notes that I took throughout the development process of our midterm, with some documentation photos\/videos thrown in.<\/p>\n

Our initial idea was to design an experience that used tactile materials, thinking about how pleasing it can be to run your hand through sand, for example. After looking through a couple of projects that used sand, we found one that used a speaker to shift sand around a plate.<\/p>\n

So rather than have a human shift a material around to create an output, we thought of the human giving some kind of input that would cause an effect on the sand. Ruta and I agreed that sound was an interesting medium, as neither of us had worked with it before. We recalled the tone output lab<\/a> and wondered how different frequencies\/tones would act upon sand. This was also an important lesson for me, since I didn’t realize up until this point that frequency and tone were the same thing. Or that, each tone has it’s own unique frequency<\/a>. COOl. First lesson of the project. So we wondered, could we get the sand to behave in different ways based on the frequencies\/tones we played?<\/p>\n

In our first iteration, we built a four note keyboard that plays different frequencies of the note C going from low to high.<\/p>\n

\"Ruta<\/a>

Ruta’s photo of the breadboard<\/p><\/div>\n

We then hooked up four LEDs corresponding to the four FSRs. We thought the LEDs would act as additional feedback to the user, so they would know when they had initiated a new frequency. We also played with having a different range of tones from low to high. Initially, we had some difficulty getting the LEDs to correspond with the correct notes – they would stay on even if their corresponding FSRs was no longer being held. We realized we had brightness as local variable and wondered if changing it to a global variable would do the trick, and it did.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_4563\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At this point we’d been simply playing tones from one of the small speakers hooked up to the breadboard. After some second-year assistance, we got a much larger speaker from the ER hooked up (glad I bought those alligator clips). Now we’re cookin’ with gas.<\/p>\n

\"a<\/a>

a plate did not work well<\/p><\/div>\n

At this point we tried out a couple of different surfaces and a few different materials. The thicker the surface, the harder it was to get the frequency waves to penetrate and cause movement amongst the particles. Also, the smaller the particles, the more easily they would move and move together.<\/p>\n