Day two and three of the second intensive were fairly busy and quite the learning experience. In making our colony of social things as interactive stepping pads there were three elements to consider: code, wiring and the actual physical stepping mat.
I spent must of day two getting the wiring correct which was not a task to rush into because it was highly prone to error. Finally, after a few trials it was all done in the right manner. This made me realise that at times is better to start over again rather than trying to debug faulty wiring. In the wiring there were a few elements to consider, there had to be a piezo sensor, photocell sensors , LEDs , piezo buzzer and a knob. Each photocell had to control an LED and tone in the buzzer, the piezo sensor had to control all the LEDs and tone, and lastly the knob modified the cycle of the tone.
All the wiring in the correct place
After deciding on the design for the board which consists of four small spaces for all the electronics to be fitted into and an acrylic top, materials had to be gathered to start building each board. The materials used in the board include plywood, acrylic and rubber matting. All the boards and individual acrylic pieces were cut in an CNC milling machine.
The initial design
CNC milling
A board in progress
Code wise, the day was saved by the Lab’s very own computer whiz Patrick Stein. Patrick got the code up and running by making an Arduino library that has all the elements we needed to control. Thank-you Patrick!
Cell library
