General

This is the Experience Brief (11.2 MB) that I presented along with Myra Einstein, Arly Ross and David Yates on our Penn Station project for Interaction Design class. It looks as if the concept of a dynamic overhead signage system, trigged by Bluetooth IDs, will be the one we prototype for our final project. I’m […]

Christian and I presented the first version of the Wireless Cubes to our Network Objects class on Thursday. Each cube is a wireless node on the Internet. They use six force sensing resistors that PIC code sends over a WiFi connection to a server program that displays a 3D block-building procedure. Both cubes provide feedback

Java, and therefore Processing, interprets a byte as being a number between -127 and +127. Other environments, including the PIC, interpret a byte as being a number between 0 and 255. To be exact, Java uses only signed bytes and the PIC uses only unsigned bytes, so translations have to happen when the two talk

Here’s a system diagram for the Tap ‘n Tell toy we’re creating for your Toy Design Workshop project. There will be at least two of these toys, linked together directly, or via through a base station. Click on the image above to marvel at the diagram properly.

I spent this evening reading up on the two Easy Radio ER400TRS-02 Transceivers that arrived in the mail from England this week. Our plan is to use these in a networked toy to create a direct wireless link between two similar toys, or between one toy and a base station that can carry its signal

I’ve been working on getting to know RS-232 Serial communications. There’s tons of acronyms, and it turns out everything relates back to “dumb” terminals talking to modems. To better understand it, I made myself this chart of the pin assignments: (click to enlarge chart) I also created a chart organized around the types of information

These are the re-presentations of my Alarm Clock and 1000 Floor Elevator projects.

We’ve configured the WiPort for basic communication in both directions. Our code takes an analog value and sends it out. At the same time, it waits for a control character (here set to “Z” for ease of use in debugging via telnet) and then checks to see if it’s followed by a data byte (specifically

Our personas presentation for the Penn Station project.

Travel Bugs are tags used for items that “hitchhike” between geocaches. They are attached to items that people find in a cache and are intended to be transported to the next cache that the finder visits. This is essentially an asynchronous ad-hoc routing protocol for objects. It would be interesting to describe a desired destination