Malaking huling!

Malaking huling is “the big final” in Tagalogian and I have no idea where that language is spoken. But what I do know is that this is one of the last posts we’ll do in this blog. The project is coming to its end and the exhibition(s) starts tomorrow. Tomorrow it is for the co-workers of Hyper Island(Stockholm & Karlskrona) and us, the students. On friday we are inviting people from the branch and anyone else who wants to come and experience technology with us.

Today we got access to our space in the exhibition halls and started setting up our installation. We are happy with our space but it could have been a bit darker, two of our four walls are white and red. That won’t be a problem tho, our installation is great. We have 7 cubes hanging down from the roof with the cute RGB leds in them. The RGB leds are wired to the arduino-card which is placed in the pedestal. We also have the rest of the equipment inside the pedestal, the laptop, the subwoofer and the breadboard(for arduino).

This day has been filled with good vibrations, both from our team and the others. Everything has gone fairly well. Although we had some problems with the LEDs just before the premises were about to close. We did some debugging and found out that the cables that we had extended were not all good. After some re-wiring, if that’s a word, we managed to fix it.

Tomorrow we have a little presentation for the module leaders about our project, we’re going to take them by storm!

Then it’s exhibition-time. We are excited!

/Fred W

Soon come…

Helluu there fellow readers,

We received a new ultra sonic sensor yesterday. Thank god for that. Now we are breaking our budget a bit but it’s ok with all of us.

All the people from Karlskrona arriwed yesterday. A nice guy named John is living with me for a couple of days now and I’m really looking forward getting to know him more. We went for a few beers and pizza yesterday evning and had a nice time. We talked alot about ideas and projects we would like to do. Very nice time!

Today we will hook everthing up. I am resonsible for all the cables (yes there are many of them) so I’m a bit nervous. But I got my cable map so I think I will make it. Hopefully we can get everyting to work around the middle of the afternoon so we can get some spare time after.

Update coming later!

Ups and downs

Good news: We had a problem with our Arduino since it did not have enough memory to recieve data from two ultrasonic sensors so we had to trick it in to taking data from both our sensor but still treating it like it is only one sensor.

Bad news: With this problem out of our way we managed to create another problem, we broke one of our sensors. We have ordered a new one (and by that our budget is about three times what the school was able to give us) and the last bits of code had to be written both in a “Dammit, we don’t have a sensor”- and a “Phew, we have a new sensor”-way so if the package with our sensor is delayed we can use the existing code and still show a some what functional product.

And as I did mention, the coding is complete. Tomorrow we will be documenting our process, comment the coding and publish it here for all of you to play with. We will also share our thoughts behind the interface pattern and how you interact with the ultra sonic sensors but most interesting the custom Firmata and multiple sensor hack.

Stay tuned!

Expect the unexpected

Today has been a productive day, even though our patience has been tested. I keep on getting surprised all the time during this project, since parts that I assumed would be really hard goes extremely smooth and some tasks I thought would be easy-style turns out to be really tricky.

For example we (Harald, Fred and Fred) built our podium yesterday, which went much more fast than I would have thought. But today we tried to get our ultra sonic sensors into the podium and running, which at some points seemed completely unpossible. Anyhow, everything is working now, we just need to make up a really good code that will create the feeling of control over the lights.

Another thing that really tests your patience is all of the unexpected things that keeps on happening. Yesterday we handed in our article about another group in the Stockholm class, just before deadline. Today it turned out that they wanted to change their concept, which meant that we had to re-write the whole thing. Thanks to our exellent market-responsible Fred Weinestad, this was no problem, but still. You just can’t predict everything, that’s definitely something I’ve learned during this module. The only thing you can do is to expect the unexpected, and leave space in your time schedule for those things.

During the past week I have learned some new stuff that I didn’t expect to learn; connecting leds with wire, and making up code! This was really awesome, and not at all as dificult that I thought it would be.

I’m really sorry about my poor english, but I’m really tired right now and the part of my brain that forms delicious sentences and comes up with accurate words isn’t at it’s full capacity right now. So this is goodbye, I wish myself and all of you who read this a really nice week-end!

Over n’ out!

// Sanna

Installing the pedestal

This is what it looks like when the components are being installed in the pedestal. Goodness!

Ultra Mega Turbo

 

Words like turbo, mega and ultra are nice and geeky. Our project involves at least one of these, ultra sonic sensors. Today we have been drilling, painting and twisting. With the drill we made holes for the ultra sonic sensors to be mounted in. We have been painting the podium I made yesterday and also twisting endless amount of cable for the LED lamps. The two sensors are now programed so they can track our movements in order to control the LED’s. The working process is still running smooth and It feels like we are well prepared for the exhibition next week. I have done allot of crafting on the podium these last days and it feels good to get physical(this is not a wesc commercial) in contrast to all sedentary work here on hyper.

Over and out/Harald

 

  

We’re getting closer and closer.

This wednesday has been filled with activities. We have completed the cubes, every single one is done and ready to be installed in our soon-to-be blacked out room. Harald did a superb job with our pedestal(see below) which will be the “control-board” in our installation. The pedestal is where we will place the ultra-sound-sensors that gives you the capability to control the light and color of the cubes.

Kristofer, our überleet programmer, has done a great success with the sensors. Earlier we had a problem as they were interupting eachother and arduino was, apparently, too weak to power both of them. That problem is solved now and they are working fine. We also tried lightning up a cube in the dark today and dang, it was beautiful.

Tomorrow we’re starting at 10:00 for the first time these weeks, yabbadabbadoo!

Glory to us!

Ultrasonic sensors

Hello world!

Fred B here for the second time!

Yesterday (yes I forgot to post on the blog yesterday) was not the best day on the programming side. It’s hard to get the values from 2 ultrasonic senors at the same time into flash. Kristofer is on it though so we are not worried.

The meeting yesterday with the class took a few hours so we didnt have any more energy when we came back from it. So we blame that for not making as much progress as we use to.

We also built some cubes so we only have a few of them left now.

Oh wait, I just heard a quote!

“We will only have work left with the cubes and the LEDs after today.”
– Kristofer Forsell

Everyone in the group is doing really well and Kristofer is not worried that he will get the code to work. Then im not worried either

Exp Tech. Day 6

Not the most productive day but none the less a very important one, the RGB LEDs are fully working and up until today controlled with a Flash GUI for debugging, the main task of today was to integrate our brand new ultrasonic sensors (I love those words). After a lot of trial and even more errors we could confirm that the AS3 Glue framework did not support sending and receiving data from our sensors.

We decided that we would have to develop our own version of the included Firmata (the code that is loaded into the Arduino chip in order to communicate with other environments such as Java, C++ and Flash). We managed after some time to read the sensor values interpreted on board the Arduino chip and sent to flash through basic serial output. As I said not the most productive day but maybe the most rewarding education wise.

Our blog got a $15 facelift today. Hooray!

Yepp, it’s true. We bought the CSS editing capability for our delicious wordpress blog today, and here’s the result. It was worth the 15 dollar we had to pay for it.