Making Toys

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  Oylum 7:38 pm on February 10, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  3 ideas 

  “Welcome Home Mood Creator”

  I hate the feeling when I come home and it’s all dark, lonely, without any sign of life, except for the possibility of a hidden mice or a thief that I wont see until I turn on that room’s light. So, I decided to make a Welcome Home Mood Creator which will sit on my wall beside front door. It will have a light sensor that detects sudden light-up condition. Then, it will send signals to the lamp in the living room and the bedroom. They will light up, with lovely mixture of colors and a warm welcoming song out of the speakers. If I want to turn them off, I’ll go to my mood creator and cover the light sensor with my finger for a while. Everything will fade out in ease.

  PS. It might have and additional function. It might send me a text message whenever it is activated, so that I’ll know if anyone breaks into my house from the front door. Or I’ll place is so well that it will both detect the light coming from the door, or a flashlight walking around.

  

  “Kitty Katty”

  A plush cat, that is awake only when we are awake. Wants a hug if not touched for a while. Sleeps and purrs if you hug for a long time. This was my dream cat after my crazy monster cat that I had to live with for 6 years. And my dreams now might come true.

  It will use a light sensor to be awake or to sleep. A pulse sensor or vibration, a pressure sensor to detect hugs and a speaker.

  

  “Sensitive Pillow”

  My husband loves to sleep hugging a pillow, a huge one, but I hate it cause when the room gets hot he throws it on top of me. Every night, I sleep with a husband and a giant pillow that takes almost half of my queen size bed. So, I imagined a pillow that swells when someone hugs it but shrinks when there’s no one hugging it. It might have a built in alarm clock and a pulse sensor, so that it can vibrate to wake us up in the morning.

  

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  Oylum 11:22 pm on February 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Week 2 Writing Response 

  The project link: https://makingtoys.net/2011/02/07/lucysam-are-brothers-and-sisters/

  1. Explain (in a nut shell) your code – structure, logic, important parts.

  My small teddy bear is sensitive to light, I use a photo resistor to measure the level of light. I wanted to code it in a way that he seems to like dark better than light by making calmer sounds when it’s dark and making crazy noise when it’s light. My code starts by defining the pins for the speaker and the LED light. It then reads values from the light sensor. Then i mapped the values that I read from the sensor to the frequencies the speaker can play using the “tone” function. I have 3 different frequency ranges that are changed with the values of the sensor.

  I also mapped the brightness of the LED light to the sensor values, so the LEd gets lighter when the light is up and sound is getting crazy. LED gets darker when the room gets darker, like the bear finally found some peace to go to sleep. I intentionally chose blue light as this is a boy.

  He actually has a sister, which is doing the reverse action, getting peaceful with light and go crazy with dark. It is programmed by my partner Kate.

  2. What did you do that you feel is new, non-obvious and useful?

  The bear looks cute and when you first look at it, it’s just a toy that makes a weird sound with a LED light on. However, the sound starts to change unexpectedly when you make even a little move towards it, as it gets affected by light changes. Suddenly, you feel like it somehow is talking to you, it is not a toy that sits there by itself, instead, it wants you to get involved  and play with it. It is not playing melodies and the sound it makes is very obnoxious, because, I wanted it to emphasize the importance of reaction in there. I dont know if it’s useful, but it’s somehow different than classic toy in a box.

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  Oylum 10:38 pm on February 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Lucy&Sam are brothers and sisters… 

  Lucy loves being in light and she is so afraid of dark. On the other hand, Sam is a naughty boy that loves dark and gets crazy when it’s too light.

  Sam is my robot boy and Lucy is Kate’s robot girl.

  The sounds could have been much better I know, only if I could program sounds better in Arduino. Here is the code for it.

  

  

  

  
  

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  Week 2 Writing Response « Making Toys is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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  Oylum 7:56 pm on February 3, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Gestural Sounds 

  We are required to create sounds to represent emotions or “gesture” and I am so bad at music. I even didn’t know the names of the notes in English, so it was a bit hard for me to program the sounds.

  I used Virtuoso Iphone app to learn and familiarize myself with US type of music notes.  Then, I wrote the code (I used the Tone Tutorial by Tom Igoe to write the notes and music)  for 6 types of gestures:

  1. Hello

  2. Alert-Alarm

  3. Bye

  4. Sad

  5.Tension

  6. Dying

  I also assigned 6 buttons to activate these 6 sound.

   

  My sourcecode is here.

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  Oylum 12:45 am on February 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Hey everyone 

  
  

  This is Oylum! I’m from Turkey, I’ve studied Visual Communication Design out there and worked 5 years for the disgusting industry. Finally, I could get my way up here, this is something I dreamed of for years.

  My interest is in Games for Learning purposes, also toys. I have a 8-year-old nephew, almost the craziest kid in the world. My goal is to create a game/toy that would amaze him so that he would sit in front of it for more than 5 mins.

   

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