For our ICM Madness challenge we were randomly assigned building a nature pong that beeps. What a wonderful randomized theme. That’s what we came up with in only two hours of activity. Enjoy playing! Z and C keys to move the pigeon platform, right and left arrows to move the squirrel platform. We were also randomly teamed into a great group: Maya, KC and me, Alizarin. We never worked together before and enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with new folks.
Creativity is the adaptation of the mind to reality’s ever-changing conditions. It allows you to find unexpected solutions to any problem you might encounter and it’s crucial for art, business and survival. Creativity is more than a human trait: it’s one of life’s innate features. Nonetheless it can be taught, learned and exercised. Here are my 2 cents on how to achieve greater creativity. Don’t wait for inspiration to strike The key to making something really creative, is making something. Do what you gotta do, then do some more. Try to do your best every time. If you succeed to…
Albino bat light-up halloween costume / wearable photography gear Halloween season and pcomp midterms were a wonderful opportunity to lay my hands on a first, ambitious project in wearable electronics. The objective: to design more that just a spooky costume, but also a practical wearable electronic device, capable of capturing footage at halloween’s wildest parties.
Pcomp Lab 5 and ICM exercise at serial communication. Promoting health by making each night a good night. Intro The following lab is brought to you by two subjects that were on my mind in the past week. The first, is Building health into the OS. A delightfully radical idea brought to discussion at ITP by Lori Melichar & Steve Downs of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They promote entrepreneurship that enhances the user’s health by changing their life-habits through their smart devices. That’s a noble goal I could see devoting my life to. At least the official work-hours of my…
An electronic plant communication device that’s also an eco-friendly fashionable bling Welcome to Lab 4, featuring a continuation and refining of my lab 3 project. In lab 3 I was clumsily trying to build a plant communication device for my tropical pots. Playing with a manufactured moisture sensor lead me to understand how unnecessary it is. Also, it was clearly designed by someone, or something, that doesn’t understand neither botanics nor aesthetics. All a moisture sensor does is lets us check if soil is moist enough by examining its conductivity. If there’s enough water in the soil, it’ll close the…
At the 6th week of fall semester came the reminder of how harmful a simple mistake could be. Humans are so limited and fragile, so prone to mistakes and malfunctions. Machines are prone to a whole new array of mistakes and malfunctions of their own. And the most harmful of them all, is the combination of human and machine working in unison to wreak accidental havoc! Statistically, just think of all the ways the electric pulses can go wrong in the circuits between a microcontroller, a sensor, an output, our computer and an open-source program running on it?! Pff. Then…
On rock’n’roll, blood sweat and code! At the 4th class some of this javascript code starts make sense. Very little of it. The newfound understanding the potential interactions, movements and complex functions that javascript allows pushes me up and forward. In this example I’m singing a short code ode to industrialism: Editor > The first version was a static city with a changing sky color. The ideal version will include a sky changing color and brightness, with buildings growing from the ground in different paces, creating the illusion of perspective. Perhaps also this playing in the background (considered by…
At the 3rd lab of physical computing, I finally acquired enough knowledge to harness technology in a way that’s meaningful to me and my little living friends. This lab’s objective is to create an electronic monitor for my beloved hand-painted pots of tropical plants. The method? Attaching a moisture sensor and an audiovisual output, so the plants can let me know when they’re dry and need watering. These are my baby plants, hand decorated, home-grown from seeds and bulbs. They’re like pets but better: while pets output noise and poop for me to clean, plants output oxygen for me to…
For this assignment, we were teamed to work with a classmate! My teammate Daniel Otero was delightful to work with. He just returned from a short trip to the west coast and brought a refreshing laid-back vibe, and also a delicious bubble tea. Daniel created the animation and I was in charge of the interface. Making homework as a team proven a little bit more efficient, and magnificently more fun. Presented below is our interactive artwork. It’s inspired by bubble tea. EDITOR
Intro to Physical Computing – Lab 2 For lab 2, I wanted to try on a new component I discovered in my package. The smallest one: a light sensor. My goal was to apply creativity, resourcefulness and basic arduino literacy into a device that might become handy. My own home-made micro night-light! Analog test First, I connected an analog circuit to make sure all the components work. They do! As you can see, covering the sensor increases the resistance and dims the LED light subtly. This result is absolutely useless: I need my LED shining when the room gets darker,…