Archive of Recent Posts by maria
Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence and Searle’s Minds, Brains, and Programs
A key part of Turing’s argument is that the perception of the interrogator (who is analogous to any of us) is all that he/we have to determine whether or not the machine is “thinking”, by the test of whether or not it is possible to distinguish a machine from a person. This is a kind […]
Following Thingy
The idea was to bring something ordinary to life by giving it a following behavior. It turned out that the arduino with wheels and all of the wiring was already brought to life. As soon as it began to move toward the magnet it was undeniably painfully cute. Everybody said “Aaaaw.” [wpvideo VvGjaamK] We used […]
Fisting
Sorry, I don’t know who took the picture above, but I love it. This is the story of the much anticipated, hyper publicized and brutally witnessed demise of team Back Off slash Golden Fist slash Golden Chariot slash Future Yacht or something. Our team: Noah Waxman, Michael Rosen, Mindy Tchieu, Bobby Genalo, Scott Wayne Indiana, […]
Spring Steel Coil Powered Mechanism
While we were brainstorming on ways to power our car I did some research on using the spring steel coil method of powering a car, where a coil of spring steel is rolled up, and wound tightly, so when released it quickly uncoils, and propels the car forward. This system is frequently used in toy […]
Final Project Idea
Mira and I talked about exploring how simple behaviors (movements) can give an object personality. At first I was thinking about my fantasy device, a bag that follows you around, and how it would inevitably become like a child or pet and would need some simple code of behavior to understand how to follow somebody […]
Transistor Lab
I used a 5V regulator to regulate the 9V going into the motor, and then I thought that I could power the arduino with that same 5V, and it worked! I was able to unplug it from the computer. But doesn’t this defeat the purpose of using an external (to arduino) power supply? Was the […]
Media Controller 3
To get back to the call and response issue, I want to resolve it for future reference, and I think I may have found the issue: a misplaced ‘}’. Here is the arduino code: int analogOne = 0; // analog input int analogTwo = 1; int analogThree = 2; int analogFour=3; int analogFive=4; int analogSix=5; […]
Media Controller
The code finally worked at 1 am. I had tried several different ways of merging the movie manipulation code with the call and response method that was working with simple color manipulation with all of the sensors, but something was going wrong. I will try again, but the standard serial communication worked fine after a […]
Media Controller tech
We decided to make a squishy soft video/audio controller. I began by making the sensors we were interested in using talk to the computer. We had ordered some sensors we wanted to play with: flex sensors, a larger force sensing resistor, accelerometers, light sensors, and a proximity sensor. I wired the sensors so that we […]
Shade Powered Tape Player
Our assignment was to apply a reversed dc permanent magnet motor generator to something, so to create something you can manually power. I decided to use a roll up shade. In our classroom there are very large shades that are open and closed by pulling on a circular chain. Therefore the power is transferred from […]