{"id":304,"date":"2010-12-07T06:03:50","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T06:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/physcomp\/?p=304"},"modified":"2011-02-09T22:43:22","modified_gmt":"2011-02-09T22:43:22","slug":"following-thingy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/archives\/304","title":{"rendered":"Following Thingy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

[wpvideo VvGjaamK]<\/p>\n

We used a digital compass with tilt compensation, and a very strong magnet to pull the thing along. Two gear head motors were controlled by an arduino sketch that speeded up or reversed one or both motors depending on where the compass was pointing based on the following diagram:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The speed of each motor is determined by mapping between high and low the compass reading’s deviation from 0\u00b0 .<\/p>\n

The two motors, controlled by an HBridge, were rubber banded to the base, topped by the ardino and the battery:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Click the link below to view and download our arduino code.<\/p>\n

CompasCode<\/a><\/p>\n

We tried to hack a Rudolf Raindeer toy to add other movement to the boa, which was our chosen ordinary object to enliven.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It gave the boa a nice vibration and a red LED nose, but our tiny gear head motors could not hold the extra weight, and I gave the raindeer motor too much power, so eventually it left us. It was good while it lasted, and I’m sad we didn’t get a video of it, but it wasn’t meant to be.<\/p>\n

The Chikenization of the Cute Arduino<\/strong><\/p>\n

It turned out our little motors couldn’t drag the whole boa, so we gave them just the right amount:<\/p>\n

[wpvideo 453EbZcS]<\/p>\n

We thought about naming it for a while, and while I was set on Ron, Mira was entertaining Winston, Wilson, Ralph, Carleton, Hector and many others from a google search for stupid names. TBD.<\/p>\n

Challenges \/ Lessons Learned: <\/strong><\/p>\n

– Bigger, more powerful motors.<\/p>\n

– IR proximity sensors in an array.<\/p>\n

– Better Power management.<\/p>\n

– We need to learn how to hack a digital switch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physical-computing","category-projects","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":644,"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mariarabinovich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}