The Slinky Metronome is now fully operational. I gave a presentation and demonstration of it in Mechanisms on Thursday. The Slinky Metronome is a Sociable Object. It keeps a steady beat, based upon the period of the Slinky spring, and broadcasts that beat out via 802.15.4 radio to the entire ITP floor. Electronic musical instruments, […]

Here’s the presentation that Kate and I gave in Jeff Feddersen’s Sustainable Energy on the second prototype for Solar Botanicalls. This version includes battery monitoring circuitry that creates a text message asking the user to change the batteries. We figured that while the plant makes phone calls when it needs something, electronics needs should be

ATRE Command Brings Sanity: When putting an XBee into a project and doing the configuration from software code. I often have the problem of some crazy sleep mode or pin definition going on that I didn’t know about. So now, all my functions for setting up an XBee start with the command ATRE. That resets

I just received a small CEM-1203 buzzer from Spark Fun for an Arduino project with sound output. After writing up a basic function to run it, I decided to generalize and fully comment so that other people could use similar buzzers without having to think through the math each time they wanted to hear a

I’ve been meaning to make a nice little function to test available memory for some time, so tonight in response to a mailing list question, I went ahead and created an Arduino Available RAM Test for exploring memory allocation. While I’m still learning about AVR’s memory management, here’s what I understand so far: The ATMEGA8

Botanicalls plants now can check on each other before making phone calls–part of my Sociable Objects thesis that explores using local sources to drive better-informed behaviors. Here’s the scenario: Fiddle-leaf fig is low on light. Its light level for the last two days is only 30% of optimal and its Botanicalls event sensor is triggered.

I did a quick test tonight to see just how big a text string I could allocate memory for on the Arduino ATMEGA168. Since there’s 1KB of RAM on the 168, the theoretical maximum would be 1024 characters. However my particular test (with Serial on and a few words for debugging) failed after 623 characters.

I’ll be teaching a new course at ITP in the Fall that examines collaboration on wireless networks. Students will create experimental devices and connect them together. Here’s the official description: Collaborative Mesh Networking H79.2672 (Robert Faludi) Wednesday 12:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Modern devices no longer need to be isolated. Recent advances in wireless mesh

NYU listed my blog today in the “Blog Beat” section of the Alumni Connect newsletter and I cannot resist the temptation to recursively post about it. Here’s an overview of ITP if you’d like to know more the Tisch program that creates remarkable projects through the study of the recently possible.

Slinky Metronome Proof-of-Concept The initial proof-of-concept for the Slinky Metronome, a Sociable Object for my thesis, is complete and it works. It uses a Slinky spring toy as a pendulum. An accelerometer at the base of the Slinky tracks the (primarily) sinusoidal movement as the bottom of the spring rises and falls. An Arduino microcontroller