PComp | The ❤️ Machine
"Having Fans Means Needing Fans" - Zoe Fraade-Blanar & Aaron M Glazer Concept The piece is an exploration of how far can a relationship between a fan and a celebrity be taken. It is the last part of a 3-part study on fandom culture (see first part here). In the era of social media, fans now have access to celebrities' personal lives. The celebrities, in turn, leave trails for their fans in the form of interviews, social posts, and symbolisms in their work. Fans need their cel


PComp | Final Project | Planning & Testing
Last week I created a housing prototype and had a play testing session with fellow ITPers. But before I went onto listing down what I learned from the session, here's a recap of my final project: The ❤️ Machine – A Tamagotchi but instead of a virtual animal pet, it's Taylor Swift in a box. Box size is tentatively 3x3 inches. The idea is to play on the culture of fandom, where usually the object of obsession (the idol) is unreachable and unattainable, but in this case, the obs


Intro To Fab | Week 2 | ❤️ Machine Box
Disclaimer: it's a very long blog post because I am horrible at carpentry. The sentences marked with * are my opinions / observations and might not be true. Getting Started - Inspiration & Planning This week coincides with PComp's play-testing week, so I decided to create some kind of housing / enclosure for my PComp's final project. The (tentative) name of the project is "❤️ Machine" and long story short, it is like a tamagotchi, but in a box form and houses a digital copy o

Visualizing My Personal Space (Part 2)
Read part 1 here. Getting Sensors on My Body I made the visualization program, now it was time to getting the actual data (i.e. placing sensors on my body). I already had some IR distance sensors from my theremin project, but I decided to buy ultrasonic sensors instead since they: (1) have a range from 2-400cm, and (2) give a value that can be readily converted into cm's. The sensors had to be on my body so my dear roommate sewed a pouch/necklace thing to hold my sensors and

Visualizing My Personal Space (Part 1)
For PComp's mid-term, I pitched an idea about visualizing the amount of personal space I get throughout the day (disclaimer: most of the time I highly value my personal space). Distance sensors I wear on my body will periodically measure the distance I have from things (aka my personal space). Then using Arduino, I will log these data and feed it into a visualizing program that I make on P5. Here is how I made it, broken into few parts because, boy, it was such a headache mak
PComp & ICM | Pinching Game
This week, I learned serial communication from PComp, so I decided to combine ICM & PComp homework together. I wanted to know how I can make P5 receive 02 or more inputs from Arduino, since in class we only learned how to receive one stream of input using Serial.println from Arduino. My idea was to cut up the string received from Arduino into different strings and save them into different variables in P5. I wired my board with a pot and an FSR, and uploaded the following code
PComp | Week 5 | Theremin v.3
This is my 3rd week working on this (see previous week and the previous previous post). Last week I managed to somewhat smoothen the value given by the IR sensor, and controlled the value using a pot and Volume 3 library. This was my "note to self" for next iteration: Consider using other sensors, maybe stretch sensor to get more stable output Try using another value-smoothing algorithm Have another sensor as vibrato control Consider using mp3 shield to output less-annoying s


PComp | Week 4 | Theremin v.2
Final draft of the week: testing hand positions and notes. Also, trying to play the Do-Re-Mi song. For this week, I wanted to improve on the Theremin prototype I created last week. There are several things I wanted to refine: Filter and map input from the IR sensor properly, resulting in more stable pitch output. Create a volume knob because the default volume is way too noisy. Make it so I could play a song with the prototype. I started with googling how to control the volum


PComp | Week 3 | Observing the Elliptical
Elliptical is a machine that looks like this: Ellipticals are used for cardio exercise in gyms or fitness centre. Typically the duration of usage is between 10-30 mins long (NYU gym has posters everywhere stating that the maximum duration is 25 mins). These machines are typically put in a row (or rows), so you can usually see other people operating and using the machine before you try them (and sometimes you get intimidated by how hardcore and sweaty they look). Usage assumpt

PComp | Week 3 | Hand-Controlled Sound
Final draft of the week This week started with trying to write a program for a button switch, that made it so that... If the button is first pressed the LED will remain turned on, and if the button is pressed again, the LED will remain turned off. Initially, I wrote something along these lines: #define switchPin 2
#define redLED 3 int ledState = 0; void loop { int switchState = digitalRead(switchPin); if (switchState){ ledState++; } if (ledState%2==0){ //modulus 2 so that it