Week 3
Kate's Physical Computing Journal
Some Thoughts on the 3rd week of Physical Computing....
Around week five I got lost so I went back and started from scratch so all journal entries from now until week five are really coming from my second time through. What I am starting to notice is that an environment where people are at such different levels of experience is very hard to work in when you come from a background of no experience with a subject. Somehow I felt like I was terribly far behind and when I went back over all of the notes and projects I realized that I was exactly where I was supposed to be according to the syllabus. I just hate having ideas that I have no idea how to build. I also really want to get into using all of this for my art but I spend so much time just trying to get the basics down that my ideas are really lacking.
Technology Reading--Artificial Voice System
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/tech/article.jsp?id=99992240&sub=Gadgets%20and%20Inventions
Hideyuki Sawada wanted to make voices for his robots that did not sound like they were computer generated but more natural. He decided to make an artificial voice system with it's own lung, windpipe, vocal cords and throat. What is interesting is not only that this could add a more lifelike effect to products or robots but that Sawada is mimicking the parts of the human body. He is also using a neural network that can learn how to produce certain sounds my listening to it's own sound and then adjusting parts of itself to get closer to the desired sound.
This is the code I made for the first part of the assignment. It was fairly easy to use and I was able to make a Christmas light like display. I'm a little confused about using resistors. It seems that whenever I use the proper resistor it is too much for the led so I always have to get a smaller resistor or no resistor at all. I have absolutely no idea how to figure out what size of a resistor I need to use???
Sub main()
call delay(0.5) ' start program with a half-second delay
do
debug.print "pin 5:"
; cstr(getPin(5))
'turns light in pin 13 on
call putPin(13, 1)
'ADDS DELAY
call delay(0.5)
'turns light in pin 13 off
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(13,0)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(14, 1)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(14,0)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(15, 1)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(15,0)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(16, 1)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(16,0)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(17, 1)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(17,0)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(18, 1)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(18,0)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(19, 1)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(19,0)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(20, 1)
call delay(0.5)
call putPin(20,0)
call delay(0.5)
loop
end sub
The switch that I added to
the board would not work and I could not figure out what was
wrong for the longest time. After many attempts at changing the code I
found
out that it was simply because I did not bridge the power and ground to
the other
side of the board.
I didn't have a lot of time
to explore the fourth step. I simply played around with using
switches to change various lights and patterns of lights on the board.
It would be interesting to play around with a random function if there
is one??
I'm not sure.
I'm really getting interested in kinetic art...i know it seems in some ways to be in opposition to what we are doing here but in other ways it is very related. More on this next week.