Week 2
Kate's Physical Computing Journal
Some Thoughts on the 2nd week of Physical Computing....
It's a little amusing to be stumbling...I'm so used to studying things that I already have a background in that this "new" experience puts me right back into the mentality of a gradeschooler...but of course I have the adult aspect so I move from excitement to timidness to freedom to awkwardness over and over again. I feel like there is such a long way to go from where I am now to where I want to be. I'm just putting my faith in the education and hoping it takes me there.
Time is very hard to come by....
Technology Reading--Winged Robot
I read about a winged robot for this weeks class. Programmers programmed the robot to learn on it's own the best way to fly. Because the motor was not powerful enough for it to actually fly they measured it's success by how much lift it got off the ground. The robot struggled and tried various things until it came up with the most efficient method. What was really interesting about this was that the programmers didn't program the robot to actually fly they gave the robot random instructions and had programmed the robot to follow the instructions that worked best for it. In this way it continually got better and better and gave the appearance of having actually learned something.
Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden are the builders of the robot.
Project 1 Make a light turn on and off with a switch
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Here is my completed circuit. This was the first one that I did and I made a number of errors but in the end it still worked. (see mistakes below). I connected a 9v battery to a 5v regulator then I connected a push button switch to the output prong. To that I connected a 220 ohm (1/2 watt) resistor and finally the led. I found that in adding more LED's the lights would stop working at all because they were not receiving enough voltage to work them. I also found that it is very hard to insert those wires into the bread board. I have since gone out and bought wires that have a thin end. These are much easier to work with (Radio Shack has a small kit of these). When I tried working with the potentiometer it exploded into flames Looking at what I did I saw that I had connected the positive wire of the potentiometer into the input prong of the regulator thereby causing a short. It was pretty though! |
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I believe that I connected the battery to the wrong place. From what I have seen of everyone else's work the battery should have been connected to the same row as the regulator and then the jumpers should have stayed where they were. I don't think this was a major flaw but I had better results when I did it that way. Secondly I kept switching the direction of the regulator back and forth. I couldn't figure out which way it goes. Of course I failed to look at the back of the package and spent too much time on this one part. I found that when the regulator was inserted wrong it became extremely hot. It was less hot when it was inserted the other way. After that I worked on a buzzer...the same type of setup as the led circuit sans regulator. I bought a motor which I am waiting to use and I am at the point of trying to figure out how to draw a circuit, which I will include in the rest of my journal entries. |
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I read "Responsive Environments in Packer & Jordan, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, Ch 12 pp. 104-120 and attended a tool safety workshop where I got to try out the power tools.
Hopefully as the class goes on I can fill this space...I would like to use my environment (New York) as an inspiration because it is so unlike any other place I have lived.