Category Archives: Physical Computing

in process: north bracelet

Are you extremely stylish? But afraid to get lost in the forest while picking mushrooms? Well, this is exactly what you need!

If to be more serious, this is small project to get more familiar with electronics: arduino, sensors, actuators and coding. I decided to fabricate bracelet witch’s strength of light depends on compass position. More north it is directed – brighter it shines. The main component for this application is tilt compensated compass module CMPS10. Also I use ‘arduino fio’ (3.3V), which is smaller than classical ‘arduino uno’ and adapted for lithium lon battery. It can be charged using usb cable. To illuminate bracelet panel  I got 3 high luminosity, white diffused leds’. Below you can see photos of creative process:

  • I started from super simple step. Circuit scheme of lights and it’s test with arduino uno.
  • Then I’ve cut few prototypes to test how different materials diffuse light. Finally Alex’s advice was to stay with crystal acrylic.
  • Second version was adapted to insert led’s inside and engraved north sign has nice luminous effect.
  • and challenge which is still waiting is to put everything together and make it work..

Also posted in Gerda Antanaityte, Students | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

The dear drawing machine

So I got an obsession with this kind of machines which come in different shapes and designs. I initially planned to build a very simple analog circuit powered by a pair of AA rechargable batteries connected to SunMod solar strip, along with a resistor, an LDR, and an LP2950 voltage regulator. The idea was to change resistance with light, so when you stand infornt of the machine and block the light it starts to draw. Then Alex advised that I use Arduino for better resistance control, so I said OK :) The idea is the same but the components are slightly different, so is the protocol.
In this case, we will get the value from photoresistor using AnalogRead and feed this into the transistor’s base pin via PWM and thus change speed of motor with resistance. It is working now, however, the sensitivity of the LDR doesn’t seem to correspond nicely with the motor spin, I increased the base resistor, but still..so more tweaking is needed and vamos a ver ! :)
//more to follow

Also posted in Moushira Elamrawy, Uncategorized | Comments closed

Laser projector project, part 2: electronics

At this point I have all the electronics working.

Read More »

Also posted in Bert Balcaen | Comments closed

Laser projector project, part 1: references, concept, first tests

For this project I want to develop a laser projector using rotating mirrors.

Read More »

Also posted in Bert Balcaen, Students | Comments closed

concepts

here are first ideas for the physical computing project what could be done using sensors together with magic arduino

Also posted in Gerda Antanaityte, Students | Comments closed