My favorite function

Ever since I started working with Arduinos I was in love with its map function. Map allows you to take a value range and convert it to another. So say you have a sensor giving you a range from 0 to 1024, but you need it from 100 to 255 you can do that. But you can also convert 0 to 1024 into 255 to 0, and it will calculate it correctly as well. So it goes down when the sensor reading goes up. Well I do a lot of sensor readings in flash as well, but actionscript does not have this much needed function. So I made one.

function map(val, min, max, minOut, maxOut){
	var base = val - min;
	var range = max - min;
	var percent = base / range;
	var rangeOut = maxOut - minOut;

	return (percent * rangeOut) + minOut;
}

I also made a constrain function but it is very simple.

function constrain(val, min, max){
	if(val < min){
		return min;
	}else if(val > max){
		return max;
	}else{
		return val;
	}
}

Just something nice about that

Im working with a friend to prototype some interactions for lighting. I just wanted to make sure I could do it so I made this and thought it looked so wonderful. I just had to post it.

Update of the week

Matt Cottam of Tellart has been my self appointed mentor/friend for over a year now, but recently I have been working on a project with him that can be seen in the video below. It is a really simple concept, but thinks kept getting the way. The hall sensor is a 5v chip, and the board is 3.3v so I just added a 5v step-up board. However, that required too much power so i had to solder it directly to the battery terminals. Well, then I had a problem where the hall sensor we are using also required it be reset after being powered up. So the power to it turns on then cuts off for a second when booting up. The piezo-electric buzzer was also to quiet at first, but I found that by putting a small magnet on the back of it they became much louder. This all seems to work now, but it was a trip getting everything to work as one.

Job update: I won’t say who they are, but I have interviewed with a few places now, and some things seem like they are going pretty well. Im not sure where I will end up after school as of now, but it will be fun finding out. I have also been contacting other places just incase, but on a few of them, I was just told that they are not hiring this year.

I know a while ago I talked about my wood block project. It didnt die, just put on hold. I have CNC (thanks Zack) two of them so far, and I hope before graduation I will have 6 done. Here is the starting of one of them. (pics and video)

Fiddl’n with a color sensor {updated}

Just before I left for vacation I got this ADJD-S371 color light sensor form SparkFun. Im back now, my essay has been written, and friends are out of town. What else could I do, I had to work on it again. Well now I have made a little progress. It does something, and here are two videos to prove it.

(added a third that shows it working a little better)

This project should be really beautiful when it is finished.

Analog Gauge

Im not sure what it is about the analog gauge, but I love it.

Usability testing, analog digital, and more

Just to start things off here is an orientation sensor that I soldered some 32AWG wire onto. It broke.. I accidentally pulled off on of the chip’s pads. So I bought another one. I put epoxy around it so It wouldn’t break again. Yeah… that worked. Until I broke it again. (trying to trim the epoxy) No more. Im waiting for a breakout board for this guy till I try again.

But what would I be using this for? Besides screwing around like I like to do. Well I have been working on (mainly drawing and order parts for) a set of new projects. They are all part of a family of single interaction blocks. They are blocks of wood that output information in some analog way in response to one thing.

For instance one of them has a nice old analog meter on it that just responds to sound. One has a circle of LEDs that all follow a magnet. One that shows your distance. One that glows based on how far your hand is over it. One that glows the color of anything put on top of it. I think there will be 7-10 of them in all. But they will be beautiful blocks of finished maple wood. So anyways, one of them was going to use this chip. I guess it will have to wait.

This past week I gave my first presentation on my thesis thus far. I was scared to give it at first because I didn’t feel like I had a conclusion. But on giving it I realized I shouldn’t have a conclusion this early on, and it went quite well. 

I have been doing usability research this past week, and what I have been finding is quite useful. I have been watching while the users perform a series of tasks on various sites vary similar to what then also need to do on wikipedia. I am not able to help the users, and I ask that the users think aloud so I can understand what they are doing/ looking for, or expected to find during the tasks. So far, all the users have had no, or almost no, trouble doing the tasks on the other sites. However, except for one user who was a wiki admin, the users have been unable to do such tasks such as adding an image and a link to a wiki page.

Bilder now has a homepage, with a logo! It is hand done (marker on mylar), and it gave me a really cool idea. Im thinking that I will enable user submission of hand done logos that will cycle through on the front page. Also, my thesis has really given me a ton of ideas, that if I can pull it off, will make bildr the best wiki I have ever seen.

In the next 3 weeks I will hear back from grad school. I wont lie, im going crazy.

Arduino, Xbee, and me

For my recent birthday Mary was nice enough to get me a gift certificate to sparkfun. So what else could I do… I spent it, and then some), and on new Funnel IO Arduinos, Xbee modules and Lithium-polymer batteries for them. The funnel is amazing. It has a LiPo battery charge chip on it (thorough mini USB) and Xbee socket built in.

Because the Xbees are version 2.5, I didn’t know that you couldn’t use some of the same commands on them. Also, the book I have doesn’t even mention some of the things you need to do. It only took me 12 hours to get it all working. Of course I could do it all in 20min now.

My senior show was this last week. This is the time when everyone shows off all their work from the time they entered their major in a gallery setting. The opening had hundreds of people there, so it got very crammed, but the show was great, but it’s sad it’s over now… I remember every year thinking about that day. I did however buy a suit for the occasion, I figured I will need it for interviews at some point anyways.

My senior thesis in in full swing now. I am redesigning mediawiki from the ground up in the fashion described in Alan Coopers book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. I have started deconstruction every part of the software, and already I can tell you it is in dire need of some interaction design. I’ll keep this updated as I work on it.

Last but not least. I was playing around with Mootools, and I started to think. Tellart, the place I have been interning at redid their website this summer. It was all done in flash, and I actually did a hefty portion of the original code in AS3. I was looking at some effects I am using for my new portfolio site (more on that later) and thought I could redo the Tellart site in JavaScript just to try it out. I was able to do it in under 2 hours (flash site took a week). A lot of that had to do with knowing what needed to be done, but also the face that html elements dont want to overlap. Either way, it is really cool to see it working on my phone.

Bildr, Sensors, Filters. Oh my!

Back Home

Im back home after a few weeks of vacation. Im glad to be home because it means I can get back to work on fun new things. In the past week, I was given a gift-card to Best Buy. The only thing I could think of getting was a wii Remote. I don’t own a wii, but having all those buttons and an accelerometer in a bluetooth device was too cool to pass up. I spent an hour or so and got it working in flash (through bluetooth). Im now able to use all the axes and buttons as variables. I just made a simple ball on the screen that moves as you shake the remote, but it is enough to build off of. 

The past few days I was also going over all the interaction design I did when making RISDpedia, and was thinking about how much better I could do it now. So I think im going to do just that. I made a list of things that could easily be improved, so during this winter-session (6 weeks) I hope to do that (along with 2 site builds, reading 2 books, interning 2 days a week, taking a class, working on a bunch of other stuff (multi-touch table), and more). A lot… I know.

Update

A lot has happened in the last week. I got some new LEDs (the big ones in the pic). They are some crazy ones from china, and they are really really bright. I was able to backlight (It was dim) an LCD with only 6 of them. But they are 8mm, and 100ma, so they take up more space and use 4X more power. But I think these will work well to replace the backlight on my MultiTouch table.

Just after getting the LEDs, I had to pack up and go 3,000mi away. I’m in Arizona now for a few weeks seeing family. I didn’t remember how hard it is to get work done when you are constantly surrounded by people you never see. I guess I was just hoping I would have more time to work and read.

I just started reading a new book (for my self), The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. So far it is quite good, Alan Cooper does a great job explaining how many of the typical approaches to software design lead to poorly designed products. I always feel a little weird reading things I agree with so much, especially when I have said many similar things before. It is great to have support for what I have been thinking, but I also feel like maybe I would learn more if it was something I didn’t agree with already.

I just updated my website with a new look and to include some newer work that had been left out. The layout is still super simple but I really like how it looks/works. I did this because I just finished applying to grad school, and I had to include a link to my portfolio. But I realized all my work I had on the portfolio part was a year old. I was planing on updating it over break, but I needed to have it up incase they looked it over. So now I’m trying to create some videos to showcase the work, but with so many people all around all the time it isn’t easy.