WHC 6: poking machine, part 2
posted Mar 31st 2007, 23:27 under arduino, processing, WHC
Over the last few days, I have been refining the poking machine with various components. First I completed an analog controller to trigger the actuators. It is composed of simple photo-resistors that are sampled by the Arduino board. Getting my hands on more photo-resistors (I had only two in my stock) turned out to be a real challenge. It took me more than four hours of intense research to browse and find a store that would sell and ship them to Sweden. They finally were delivered pretty fast (next day) from Elfa with a custom order number. The idea of the board is to act as input device to control and record sequences for the array of actuators.
The second thing I did this week was to develop an application to control the actuators. This component is essential if I want to test and evaluate various patterns or sequences with users. It makes recalling and replicating the sequences over time possible and almost enjoyable. I am quite happy with the software I was able to complete in 2 days of work. I still have to code the import/export module for xml config files. Nevertheless it working good, with click and drag functionalities. Processing talks to the Arduino board via serial communication, both for controlling the actuators and polling the sensors for the wooden board.
The next step is definitely testing. I have to get out of my corner and go to the users and see how they understand and feel the various signals. I still have to come up with some sort of plan of action before asking users to put their hand on the device.
