Come up with a game!

Spandex                      Lab Chairs                Cabbages
Dried Beans                Yarn                          Magnifying Glasses
Plush Toy Bats            Padlocks                   Paper Clips

We have been tasked with coming up with a game that involves at least one of these things. Simple. My entry is Hallway Derby!

Two people are tied down to lab chairs using the yarn. They remain in control of only their arms, which are holding fire extinguishers. The rest of the participants split into cheering sections for each participant. These participants are given three additional items: two cabbages and a plush toy bat. The job of the people holding these items is to give them to their team's racer as they go past. These items can be used to attempt to mess up the other racer. The cabbages can be thrown, and the plush toy bats can be used either to bat away the cabbages or to poke at the other player.

Last but not least, the participants are definitely required to be wearing spandex morph suits!

Project Audio

Amanda (http://amandaimperial.wordpress.com/), Rebecca(http://arduinohackers.wordpress.com/), and I teamed up once again to work on a project, deemed Project Audio. This was a smaller scale project for practice in preparation for the big final project. For this one, we needed to incorporate a speaker and a microphone.We came up with the idea to make something that detects temperature, and when you speak to it, it will talk back and light up either green (room temperature), red (warm), or blue (cold).

We ran into an issue early on, where we were using a capacitor instead of a thermistor (some of them do look very much alike). We fixed this issue, but we were struggling to get the temperature reading just right. We tried changing resistors, thermistors, code…but with no difference in results. Finally, we went to the professor for help. She showed us a diagram of how to wire a thermistor–turns out, we were wiring it wrong. After fixing this, the thermistor was working splendidly.

Now we just needed to fix the microphone. We had tested some mic code earlier, so we altered that for the rest of the project. The mic was tricky about detecting sound. We never did get it to work perfectly, but it works well enough. After adjusting the mic and the range for the temperature, our project was done. When we made noise or tapped the mic, the speaker would make a sound depending on the temperature; the higher the temperature, the higher the pitch. Originally we wanted the speaker to output something like a .wav with custom commentary, but we didn’t get that implemented in time. Regardless, it’ still cool.

Project Audio – Complete.

Project Runway: Project Finished!

Project Runway: Turn existing physical behavior into a compelling, interactive experience using a person's clothing or worn accessories (not gadgets). Incorporate a transistor, external IC, motor, speaker or fan to help accomplish the "conversation".

Laser tag is complete!

After working for three more days, with a five hour marathon session on the 26th, we finally were able to get the game working in its entirety. 
Along the way some changes were made to the project. Box-cat is no longer the target, and the emitter is no longer a glove. After speaking with our professor, we realized that a laser pointer strapped to a glove did not really fit the requirement for a wearable component to the project. We decided that the emitter would be wearable instead, which forced us to scrap box-cat. 
We tossed around a few ideas on what to do for a wearable replacement. Some of the ideas included making cardboard armor and turning box-cat into a hat. In the end, we opted to go with just a shirt with the sensors in it. 

Getting the shirt assembled was a struggle. In an attempt to avoid any kind of sewing, we bought a shirt with a breast pocket. The thought behind this was to have a place to put the arduino where we would be able to access it easily. Using a very liberal definition of "easily," this idea worked out great.

Our next major struggle was getting the working sensor into the shirt. Where we had thought using the pocket would make it easy, we were instead ambushed by a few problems. The first: working in such a confined space. Having so many parts to go into the correct holes in the breadboard was a struggle. Getting the entire setup working when it was sitting open on a desk is a cakewalk, but trying to assemble it through a shirt was another thing entirely. That leads to the second issue, after sticking the phototransistors through the shirt, it was impossible to tell which prong was which, as we could not see the tab on the transistor itself that marks the prongs. We had to mark the prong on our own after it got through the shirt. After struggling with these first two issues for an hour, we finally got the phototransistors connected to the breadboard through the shirt. We were able to do it by turning the entire pocket inside out, but that created our third issue: after getting everything hooked up, we had to turn the pocket back into a pocket, all without dislodging any of the pieces. This took us a couple tries, but we were able to get it working. 

Awesome! It works! We can shoot the transistors with a laser pointer and they play a little tune!
At this point, Amanda made a joke about how it would be funny if the speaker played the beginning of Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" instead of our little tune ("Shot through the heart! And you're to blame, darlin you give love a bad name!") because the sensors were over the heart when the shirt was being worn.

Challenge accepted.

Another half our of work, including finding sheet music for the song and turning the music notes on the staff into digital sounds that the arduino and speaker could interpret and play, and it worked. The sounds it produces aren't perfect, especially the second half and the parts where there would normally be a carry, but it was at least recognizable as the tune. 

Mission accomplished!