I suggested we search for “Arduino NG SPI” and we found a thread in the Arduino forums about this issue. To rectify the problem, I removed the pin 13 LED from both of her Arduino NG boards and SPI started working properly.

Sewing Cubby
One leftover piece of plywood was used to make Kelly’s sewing organizer. She also wanted a cubby system to store some of her batting and yarn.

We started off with some sketches — first exploring possible features of the unit

and then deciding how big we could make it given the available materials.

I fleshed out the design in Google Sketchup so Kelly could get a sense of the proportions and then built it. All joints are butt joints attached with 2″ coarse-thread wood screws.

Speaker Stands
Since days after we moved into our current apartment, our speakers have been perched atop cubes of taped-together CD jewel cases. This helped to eliminate some of the unpleasant boominess, but I’ve never been satisfied with the sound in the room. Months ago, I tried some experiments and found I liked the sound better when the speakers were elevated to ear height while I was seated on the couch. I didn’t think it would be too difficult to make speaker stands; I just didn’t get around to doing it until now.

Height and stability were the most important considerations in my design, so I tried to work with those parameters before considering whether I had enough leftover plywood to actually build the design.

After completing the design, I took stock of my remaining plywood and found I was very short of the material my design required. I considered making the stands shorter, but wasn’t really satisfied with the idea, so I let the design sit for a few days and then realized that by making the uprights thinner, I could still keep the height I wanted.

I revised the design and then began building.

I uploaded the model to the Sketchup 3D Warehouse, so you can download it if you like.

I may post this to Instructables one of these days. I already added captions to all of the pictures before uploading them to my Picasa web album. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an easy way to get the captions show up on this page without hand-editing the HTML.

One of my goals for the summer was to learn how to user Sketchup. Here’s a first sketch of the old room layout.

Once I got the hang of using Sketchup’s “inference engine,” things started getting easier. Here’s the design of my hutch as well as a side table I made out of a recycled desk.

Here are a few phots of the process.

Since force sensing resistors from Interlink Electronics are expensive ($5-6/each) and also because I couldn’t see how the fragile FSRs would fit into the holes we planned to use, I wanted to find a better solution.

I discovered it was possible to create FSRs out of wire and plastic wrap. Others have used conductive foam and wire mesh. Reading about linear position sensors also gave some insights.

I took 22 gauge wire from the physcomp lab, stripped it, and bent it back and forth to mimic the “fingers” on the FSRs I purchased from Interlink. After making two wire finger pieces, I wrapped one in seven layers of plastic wrap. I place the second set of wire fingers on the outside of the package and wrapped it into the existing package. My first few tests seemed very promising. When no pressure was applied to the package, the resistance was infinite. When I squashed the package, the resistance dropped down to about 10K.

The next trick was to try to duplicate this behavior on the end of a PVC pipe. We first tried applying the plastic wrap/wire packages around the end of the PVC pipe. The results were less encouraging than my initial experiments.

The homemade sensors were unreliable: either the sensor package was too tightly squashed between the PVC and the surrounding hole (and gave no resistance) or it was too loose and no amoung of bending the pole caused a reading.

Strategies for sensing movement:

• Flex sensor
• Magnetic pickup (like electric guitar)
• 2-axis potentiometer (joystick)

After brainstorming more about producing sound and sensing movement, we built a tiny prototype, using the technique I discovered while building a prototype for Designing for Constraints.

I developed this prototype from a simple sketch:

I built the prototype out of materials I already had in my studio:

CD jewel case covers	Old guitar strings and 24 gauge wire spun into springs
	26 gauge wire wrapped around a still central armature

Class feedback:
- Walls of the piece could deform under pressure.
- Piece seems performative — it may require my performance of the object to get its point across. A video might help with this.
- Stretch the box to its limits and videotape it as it breaks

There are several things to do yet to properly document the project’s electronics:

• Add the clock crystal and other required components for the ATMEGA-8
• Draw a system block diagram
• Draw the finite state machines (although this may be overly complicated

Anyone have suggestions on how to simplify this schematic?

The other major discovery I made which explained much of the circuit’s random (unintended) behavior was that the two AD5206 chips interfered with one another. I plugged a single LED into each of the twelve outputs (across the two chips) and found that a simple test program didn’t operate properly when both chips were running. As soon as I disconnected the three data lines (CLK, SDI, and CS) from the second chip, the first chip would work properly. I wondered if there might be some sort of “floating” condition when the two chips were used together. Since CLK and SDI were shared, I hypothesized that CS was likely the culprate. To test this, I added 10K pull-down resistors on the chip selects of both chips. It worked! The test program dimmed the lights in the proper sequence rather than skipping around randomly on the third and fourth outputs.