learning the ropes

I just received email from Michael Dory regarding his group’s presentation in Applications of Interactive Technology. Just in case the comment I made at the Help Tank site doesn’t make it up there… Kelly and I visited the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan several months ago to see an exhibit entitled “Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art”. One of the exhibits there was by Michael Rakowitz. You can read about his paraSite project for some ideas of what has already been done in the area of ad-hoc homeless shelters.

When considering what to do for the creative part of my Physical Computing lab, I initially thought of some sort of mood-proclaiming piece of clothing.

Instead of using a flex or pressure sensor to light up the LEDs on a “luv-o-meter,” I wanted to prototype a display for a t-shirt that could display a short and partially encrypted message about the wearer’s stress level. I remember seeing a persistence of vision project on one of my first trips to ITP (perhaps it was the winter show?) and thought I might be able to make a single column of LEDs light up and scroll the message past.

Using only a slightly modified version of the circuit from my game of catch, I set about drafting some code to drive a vertical array of 5 LEDs.

(more…)

In addition to the adjustable LED level suggested in the lab notes, I decided to program the Arduino board to gradually fade the LED level down from the level set by the potentiometer. Last week when I was working on my game of catch I wanted to have the first LED gently fade in and out during the “wind-up” phase of the throw. This week, I figured out how to do it.

(more…)