2/24
Team 1–> Chapters 1& 2
Setting-up. Hello World
2/28
Team 2–> Chapter 3
Building a Better Doorbell
3/3
Team 3–> Chapter 4
Romantic Light Sensor
3/7
Team 4–> Chapter 5
Sensor Networking, intermediate
3/10
Team 5–> Chapter 6
Advanced Networking
3/14 & 3/17
Spring Break
3/21
Chapter 7 – Assignment
Salty Sandwich is what you would call a “Debbie Downer”. Never satisfied and mostly complaining, Salt Sandwich (I named mine Sal), lives in the back of your fridge and acknowledges your visits to your fridge as well as if he hasn’t seen you in a while and if the fridge has been open for too long with indifferent and whiney beeps and boops. Sal has no “purpose” other than to be that item in the fridge that no one really wants to acknowledge.
Playing off the idea of Lee’s Nom Nom trash bin, I wanted to make a creature that was similar in functionality, but when it came to character and personality, acted as a foil. Originally, I conceived of a recycling bin that, as opposed to a nom nom, wasn’t single-mindedly focused and primitive in his expressions, but rather was conscientious and thoughtful. It seemed especially appropriate considering the difference in the motives between throwing away something and recycling it.
But this didn’t really jibe with me personally, and I also had the problem of my recycling setup at home wasn’t really conducive for making a stand-alone character that would convey it’s own individuality in an interesting way. So, this led me to look for other things that could act as a talking bin.
Fortunately, after a bit of looking around, I realized that my dog’s food is kept in a contraption like Lee’s trash can, and the idea of a talking dog food dispenser amused me greatly. Not only does it do the opposite of a trash bin (it provides instead of consumes), I also really liked that it could potentially talk to my dog, who seemed to be the most interested in the beeps and boops that my arduino can make. Lastly, using an upper-class British character as a model for my creatures words (I was thinking of Stephen Fry), seemed much funnier and silly and ironic on a dog food dispenser than on a recycling bin, which came across as haughty and judgmental.
Building and coding Chauncy was fairly straight-forward. My LCD screen came together pretty much right away, but unfortunately the anode wire of the LED backlight came out just after I taped the parts into their final position. This made it so that the light no longer came on when a new message was flash, but the plus side is that it probably saved my battery a good deal of juice.
Here’s what the electronic components looked like:
And here’s a sample of the early version working:
In order to have Chauncy’s head on the outside, but the light sensor in the can, I had to use some wire wrapping wire to extend the photoresistor. With the low light in my kitchen, I had to attach it to the side but near where the ceiling light shined brightest.
And here’s the finished product!
If you would like to see the arduino code, feel free to download it here.
Unfortunately, I was so distracted by all of the goods that I didn’t get to capture a few other cool toys, but I am sure they will make it on to the blog with everyone else’s posts.
As you can imagine, I was excited to see a led ring 🙂 Although it was not as a great as the one I made last semester, it was still fun to see that the commercial industry is doing it.
The kuzebot was neat, plush robots that are attached to a cause.
Explain (in a nutshell) your code structure, logic, important, parts?
The darkness loving owl prototype had the code structured in a case/switch structure allowing for us to manipulate the if/else statements to react based on the last situation. Was a little complicating for me to understand but I think we got a successful action.
What did you do that you feel is new, non-obvious, and useful?
I don’t think we did anything interestingly new per say, but the code can be useful in the future when working on something that reacts based on the last function or state that it was in.
Owl
A piezo speaking owl that communicates when it is in distress from the brightness in the room. It is a darkness loving prototype that I worked on with Minho
(More ...)
Please just your code in “read more”. thnks!
Produced 6 emotions to portray Hello, Goodbye, Leaving, Sad, Dead and Thank you. (More ...)
OM NOM is kinda scary and encourages waste. When you feed him he RAWRZ angrily, then he’ll aggressively begs for food, though he appreciates your actions after you feed him. If you don’t feed him for 12 hours he’ll get super P/O’d and let you know it.
OM-NOM uses a photocell to know when his mouth is open, the LCD screen tells you his emotional state using text and image, and a little speaker lets him emote vocally.
He has 4 states.
+Opening Roar – When he first opens his mouth he kind of RAWRZ.
+Begging – If you leave him open he keeps begging for food / garbage.
+Happy – Once he’s been fed, he’ll emote happily and make an nom nom nom noise.
+Hungry – If you don’t feed him for more than 12 hours he’ll repeatedly make an angry noise every 10 minutes until you feed him / throw something away.
He’s constructed with a cleaned out delivery food container with all the various electronics held in place with duct tape, thumb tacks, and brass hangers. Pretty ghetto, but it works!
CODE!
(More …)
Lee, great project. But please post your code in the post in the ‘read more’ section.
this project is awesome. i love this. this is “viral product” material.
great videos, great documentation.
Thanks I fully intend to try and develop this more. I’d be interested to try and figure out how to actually sell it this summer.
Toy Fair was awesome. Obviously witnessed most of the same things as everyone else, but spent the majority of my time on the bottom floor.
The flying fish were amazing, the simple tail movement buffets the fishes body in the air and makes it look super authentic. I only wish they were smaller, autonomous, and had some flocking code and proximity sensors built in, so you could just release a school of them and let them go. It’d be like living in a fish tank!
Star Wars big head bobble heads! 0 technology here, but I want all of them!
Keepon was stupidly cute. I don’t think it’s new I’m pretty sure I heard of it before, but had never witnessed it for myself.
Bioliods were pretty awesome dancing machines
I suppose I probably saw the same things everyone else did at toy fair, but since I was wearing an exhibitor badge, I was totally being bounced at many of the top floor booths. The guy at Matel, for example, came just short of evicting me for looking at toys.
I saw the creepy coma dogs (someone else already posted pictures) and am wondering how far “illusion of life” should go in certain narratives. One guy working for the company said “better than a real pet!” Not sure about that… I can just imagine some kid wondering why the realistic, breathing dog isn’t waking up, becoming increasingly disturbed. Comatose puppies is a strange concept for a toy.
I of course loved the HEX bugs, but who doesn’t? My bf and I were led through the tour and saw all the cool concepts of desk toys they are making. The tour guide pointed out the intellectual property sign on the wall and mentioned that the company had spent $6million or something just to ward off knock-offs. Interesting stuff. I really wanted one.
I loved the really smart Ollo robots. I thought they not only did cool stuff, but in a smart way. The girl at the table was really nice and liked talking about the bots and challenged me to figure out the “elephant”, who was simply just being guided around a square by simple pushing and shoving. Really smart, really cool!
Yeah. Andy has Fridge friend. My friend is Freezer friend. Each has neutral, lonely, happy and jealous states with two light sensors. Each can check the other one’s door, and express jealous to us. They are very jealous and lonely, so they are not going to stop complaining until we use them.
PERFECT PETZZZ
They are doing nothing. Like the name, they are just sleeping. We can see they are breathing, there are little changing on their chest or stomach part. I like this simple idea. Without using complicate and any sensor, it embodies baby animals well. I like these quiet pets, also allergy free.
GLOW CRAZY
The pointer(?) emits ultra-violet light, and the panel seems to absorb the light and keep the light short. I want to know what the material of the panel is. I want this material as my wall paper. It reminds me of graffitiresearchlab , but it much cheaper($25).
BIOLOID
I saw similar robots’ videos a lot on Youtube. I was wondering how they programmed the whole performance. It might be take forever, but I asked them. The new kind of motor called as Actuator(?) remember the angle then send it to computer, so we can make a pose with hand and save it.
Minho and I worked together to create two jealous siblings that live on your refrigerator. One is the freezer and the other is the fridge. Each one is happy when their door is opened, and will get sad if it has not been opened in a while. And if the other door is opened they will get jealous of their brother.
Each creature uses two photoresistors to see when the doors are open, and LCD screen to make faces, and a piezo speaker to make sounds.
Each one has a face and a sound for the following events:
– Neutral – It makes this face when the door is not open, but it has not been too long.
– Lonely – If Fridge Friend goes too long without seeing the light in the, it will put on a sad face and cry at random intervals
The jealous sound will play over and over lowering each pitch and how long it draws out the last growl until the other door is shut again. At a certain point, the growl stops moving down in pitch (so as not to go bellow what the piezo can produce), but the length will continue to increase.
The entire thing is mounted on a box that stay outside of the fridge with the photoresistors being mounted inside and sensing the light.
The crying and other similar sounds happen on a semi-random basis, because no user would want to hear them constantly. In the video, I am using very short amounts of time for everything to trigger, but when actually setting this up, it would take several hours instead of several seconds to become lonely. It could still become jealous very quickly, though, since users don’t generally have their fridge or freezer doors open for very long.
I went to Toy Fair along with Thom Hines, Scott and a few other folks on Monday and looked at almost all of the same exhibits. I guess I should have been quicker to post.
The Tandars were definitely the most lifelike toy at the fair (although there was a booth selling sleeping dog toys that were almost creepy in their resemblance to actual napping dogs). They had a wide range of movement, could talk with one another, and most of all just looked alive. We taked about how they had a strong resemblance to the Gelflings from Dark Crystal, except instead of requiring a team of puppeteers, there was just a computer inside. Although the Furby craze has certainly died down, these guys seemed like a good improvement.
We also saw a set of tops that were motorized to keep spinning and were able to battle by being controlled by magnets under the table. They were fairly simple, but had a cool Tron look to them.
The best thing I saw was the prototype for Skylanders, a cross platform video game. Although the actual gameplay seemed somewhat generic, the game will feature about 50 characters, all of which are represented by small figurines. When the figures are placed on a special platform, they are brought into the game and can be used by the player as their character until another figure is swapped out. More than one figurine can be placed if two players want to play. The characters advance and get new skills and attire as they play, and all of this information is stored on the figurine, allowing them to be brought to friends houses and used there etc. I like it because it brought a trading card element to the game since players could trade their high level character for something else, and the actual physical object has value in a way that most games don’t allow for.
All told, Toy Fair was a lot of fun, as it should be with a name like Toy Fair.
Taking advantage of our time off from class yesterday, a large group of us went to to the Toy Fair for the greater part of the afternoon. The show was huge, almost overwhelming, and like Yuri said, just the time to walk the floor without even stopping to look would take hours. Fortunately, a lot of booths were obviously not worth stopping at, which gave a few of us guys a chance to spend more time at the fun ones.
My favorite section was definitely where the hi-tech electronic toys were being shown. This section of the show had tons of tows that were doing new and interesting things, and seemed to be experimenting more with product character in much more interactive ways. One of the first that got me pretty excited was Tandars, a little forest creature that has a lot of functionality built into a cute, little body.
The booth itself is actually what first attracted me to Tandars. With its forest-like appearance, it really stood out. The booth really added to the ambient feel of the toy, and it placed the creature in his natural habitat. It was perfect. The creature has sensors all over it’s body so that it detects touching and petting, and proximity sensors to detect when something or someone is nearby. It apparently has over 50 “phrases”, which combined with its eye motions and moving ears, really gives you the impression that it is alive and has emotions. Also, if you get two tandars next to each other, they detect each other through IR and communicate. The lady working the booth was obviously really happy to show him off, and she seemed to really have a bond with her Tandars.
Around the corner from there was a game I had recently heard about but didn’t understand until I saw it. Tetris Link is essentially Tetris meets Connect 4. I played most of a round with Andy, Scott and the girl who was working the booth. It was definitely a lot of fun, a nice adaptation of a video game into the board game realm.
And here we are playing with the giant tetris pieces. Scott was trying to use his piece to ruin my place in the photo, just like he tried to do in the game.
And the product I saw the most potential in, as far as finding ways for the concepts and technology to be adapted and used by a variety of companies and businesses, is the video game Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. Instead of saving your game progress and character to the memory on the console, all of your attributes are stored in a small action figure which gets placed on the “portal” hooked up to your game machine (in this case, a Wii). As you build up your character and make advancements, those things get stored in the memory chip of the action figure itself. Then, when you go to play at a friends house or on a different system, you can just set your character on their portal and play with your character. Another interesting feature is the ability to swap out characters at any time. I can see a lot of strategic potential for using one character instead of another at different points in a game.
The portal itself seems to have some pretty cool tech in it. Figurines only need be placed on it, and almost instantly all of the connections are made and the character is in the game. When a new figurine is placed on top, the portal changes color, depending on the type of power that character has. And with each action you make in the game, the portal seamlessly syncs up the figurine to reflect the character’s latest stats.
The figurines are just about three inches tall and feel like the figurines we saw all over the show, but knowing that the character in the game that you may have spent hours building up and developing makes it seem more special. It’s as if the figurine somehow was that video game character, and vice versa. One of the guys at the show booth mentioned that this development could have a deeper level of meaning, too, when kids started to trade their figurines or started collecting them. A level 7 character would be more valuable than a level 3, and perhaps the rarity or specialness of certain characters would provide a built-in sort of stock market for these characters. Could be interesting, and I really look forward to seeing where this kind of technology goes.
I was pretty intrigued by the spyro the dragon action figure/game combo. I’m sure some of this is due to great personal fondness for the original ps1 spyro the dragon video games, but this fairly pedestrian but fun seeming cooperative action-brawl game looked fun enough on its own using the wii controls. The game itself was secondary to the character system, which featured a pad that allowed the player to place one of 30 spyro action figures on the included pad accessory and play as that action figure in game, making up a total of 8 classes of powers. Game status/unlockables/upgrades are all stored to the action figure and can travel cross-platform. Sure it’s an excuse to make more $ from a game, but at least it’s doing it by doing something cool. Also, you can play coop by putting any two action figures on the pad. Very neat.
These Tandars were pretty detailed! Sure they still kinda look like Furbies/Gizmo, but their faces were so advanced. Their eyes were so bizarre and glistening, and they really had so many distinct expressions. So creepy, with their little human baby faces. Pretty cool that puppets of 25 years ago, that took 5-10 pioneers, can now really be approximated by a reasonably priced electronic toy. Now someone needs to make something that ISN’T a gremlin…
These toys were really cool, and example of a very simple and reproducible mechanical element. This playset was really neat, the battle element very engaging. Plus the guy who showed us the booth turned out to be the lead product designer. He pretty much does the whole thing himself, and these toys are pretty big. Interesting conversation!
Very cool visit to the Toy fair, my Favorite things I have to be honest, considering we are working with technology, are the wooden toys, but is not because they don’t have any technology. I like is the simplicity and detail in design. yet, these toys manage to have a very appealing look for children. I Think a very cool project would be to reconsider these wooden toys embedding technology playing with the contrast between the design detail and the fascination of technology in toys.
Here are some of my favorite toys:
My other favorite is this Chamaleon by Think Geek. I find it very fun to use, but I like the idea of the many possibilities one could do with the same technology.
I also like them because they gave me one….
Finally the floating fishes are so cool they have this kinetic movement on them that attracks people. Besides they are flying making no noise and are fishes on the air of course
Last but not least a picture of Naz as a Kauzebot
Evander Batson
xinhe feng
FluffyLeecy
frankiezek
gaboratparsons
giang063
gracegotlost
lauriewaxman
Siwen Li
Xiaofeng Lin
Yury Gitman
mar28th
Max(TONG WEN)
Soohyun
sabotai
Susan Lin
Lee and 
Making Toys 
Reply