Dhruv nawani
From Wiki
Well just the thrill of making my own machine brought me to this course and a
prior interest in Processing and other programming languages. I was always
fascinated by Lego Mindstorm and stuff like that and i guess i would be building
something way more cooler here or atleast even if i end up making my own sensor.
Contents |
July 6
Got introduced to the course and Arduino and the Arduino language. Tripped on it
for a while and then had to read.
The amount of pollution we have in different mediums was shocking. Our country
alone dumps like millions of tones of garbage everyday. Worst kind of pollution is
caused due all the radiowaves which seem so harmless while learning about them in
physics but have actually forced so many species of birds to either migrate from
the city or die.
It was a noted fact that sparrows were driven away from most of the parts of Delhi
due to all the radiation and radiowaves coming from the mobile towers. I used to
hate those birds but it feels weird now that theres nothing in the balcony making
noise. I actually miss them.
July 7
Figuring out Arduino language was pretty cool. It was sought of easy to understand
and could relate it to Processing but actually programming a microcontroller and
makeing it do something was pretty intimidating.
Blinking LED was a start though after seeing few examples ( from the arduino
website itself ) of what all is possible using an Arduino board was like crazy.
- Even the DIY philosophy and the fact that the arduino board is also made by
designers and people who were not from science background made a microcontroller
was pretty encouraging and INTERNET is one of the greatest inventions ever. You
can google anything and learn.
- David Dunn's idea of working with sound to relate to nature and starting a
communication raises a lot of questions as well as ideas with astonishing results.
Would the response ( Acoustic Ecology ) be similar incase of sciencetifically
modified organism and plants?
July 8th and 9th
Started with brushing up my basics and exploring Processing and Arduino. Worked
out some simple programs out of which one took an hour to make any sense. Helped
few and explained some of the basics of processing.
- Actually learned and recalled a lot of syntaxs while just explaining or
discussing. Really need to keep in touch with the language.
- Linking processing with arduino and controlling outputs from the computer was
interesting but got a little boring making the led blink. Sought of made a game
out of it by using mouse and keyboard together.
Now am trying to use sound as an input to make the led to glow and even using
video (basically face recognition or something) which seems like a big
challenge.
July 13th - 14th
Sites like GOBAR times and others which are or have been doing work on similar
lines to what we were doing gave an insight what we might be dealing and what we
would be going against.
- The govt. way of taking this matter of excessive pollution seems futile. Starting
form the monitoring devices to collecting to articulating the data to giving a
cumulative statistics to the public.
After finding the general standards and getting the graphs it can be easily be
stated that these sheets they but up on the wall are completely fake.
Using a simple apratus which just involves making a frame and some petroleum jelly
can tell you how bad the current air pollution state is. One doesnt need to any
high end machines to find it out, using a simple lense or a magnifying glass you
can see the amount of pollutants which are present in the air arround us sitting
at home.
- I believe such simple devices or ways which can be brought easily to the world
can be used to bring a difference. Rather than bombarding them with facts and
stats trying to scare them, it would be wiser to provide them with equipment which
can help them test it themselves.
After all the thinking about how messed up the air around us is I think am going
to go back to trying to make the sensor work and make THE LED GLOW. AM going crazy
trying to find bugs in my program.
One of the achivements of the day - Built my first circuit though was slightly
messed up but worked.
July 15th
1.Using bend sensor to make the led blink
[[2. Changeing the frequency of the sine wave using a Bend sensor
]]
July 21st
Connecting a LDR to a servo motor was part of another project IGEM for which i
was working on building an installation. It was just a test to check the movement of the servo with the changing input
values. The program worked beautifully and now the next step was to test it by suspending
it somewhere outside with a rainstick.
July 22nd
I had always wondered how live data can be uploaded and viewed online. I knew it
was possible but didnt know how it works. I am really not fond of web related
work, so I started the day by figuring out how Pachube works. We had to make a
prototype which had a small function and purpose. The values uploaded could be
used as an input to map or do anything one wants. I was already working with an LDR and the weather that day happened to be changing
a lot. So the light sensor was kept outside and the values which were gathered
were uploaded to Pachube through the laptop. It was a pretty cool to see the rapidly changing numbers on pachube everytime i
pressed refresh.
We had a solder party with dusjagr. Well we sat and made very cool electronic
musical instruments using the most basic elements one could imagine (
potentiometers,capacitors, resistors and a battery of course ) . We then got a
little high on the screeches coming from our tiny fancy product with a blinking
LED. To make the synthesiser we followed a diagram made by dusjagr himself. We
just soldered away the parts onto these circuit boards (designed by dusjagr). The
best thing was that the diagrams and the circuit boards designed by him were self
explanatory, so even though most of us might have touched a soldering iron for the
first time it wasn't hard for anyone to finish it on their own. By the end almost
everyone had a screechy machine to blow their roommate's head.
July 23rd
The scientists who were involved with this project came today to speak about the
possibilities need and the scope for these sensors in todays world, and how they
arrived on the idea of putting up pollution sensors around the town to bring about
awareness. Our role in this entire project would be to creatively design products
or systems which would be used to represent the information which would make a
direct and detailed impact. The representation could be in the form of anything - interface, an interactive
installation, a spoof, an event to catch medias attention etc.
By the end of the discussion we had an idea about what we have to do.
Week 4: July 27-30
Well after the talk with the scientist everyone started working on individual
ideas.
Apart from that Dusjagr was still around and was spreading his DIY wisdom. While
some people were still coming in to make the synthesiser, he decided to start his
Bioelectronix for Artists workshop. Which by the way was mind blasting. Bioelectronix sounds like a real fancy sci-fi
term but what he showed us there was nothing more than just inverting one small
piece of lens. A small of piece of lens which opens up infinite amount of possibilities. All we did was we took a webcam. Opened it up. Took the lens and turned it upside
down. And when you put some samples on it and flash some light you would know what i
mean.
What i did there apart from just breaking a webcam and turning the lens? I stared at these things called Water bears for a few hours. Water bears are these microscopic animals that kind of look like bears. They are
pretty cute and had some colour as the quality of the lens was pretty bad ( which
turned out to be good made them look real cool). apart form that after Dusjagr showed me some of his cool patches which he had
written on PD i got all inspired and tried learning PD and tracking them but i
didn't like it much.
Though Dusjagr had some samples of microscopic life which he sneaked into our
country. We decided to go around Yelahanka and find some more samples. Maybe we
could get our hands on some of the desi water bears.
July 29th
We went on a very eventful walk around Yelahanka which was great i think. Though
we found nothing.
July 30th
- I started working on the installation, since we had everything except for a rainstick to test whether or not the motor can take the weight.
We used gautams rainstick but the motor couldn't take the weight. It was hard to tell whether it was a power issue or the motor just couldn't take the weight of the stick once it was suspended. SO we decided to make a lighter rainstick.
Week 5: August 3rd-6th
Victor gave a presentation about critical designing which was very inspiring. He had a huge range of examples which was brilliant as it broaden my thought. The discussion we had with him later about how to involve political, social issues or even religion helped find direction and context to base my ideas on. Everyone came up with some ideas. After the discussions and the presentation of everyones idea we settled on doing only 5. Out of the 5 i liked the T-shirt and the Chimera and decided to work with them. Since i knew a bit about programming and using an Arduino, i ended up helping everyone with their projects and simultaneously worked on the installation for IGEM. I was also suppose to work on the website with sandeep but since i didn't know much about CSS or using wordpress i wasn't much of a help.
Week 6:10th-13th
It was pretty hectic going around fixing everyones problem. I started with working on the installation. Me and sandeep had successfully made our own rainstick were pretty proud. It was beautiful and even though it totally exhausted us it was definitely worth it. We added green gram and rice but green gram gave it a pleasant sound. The rainstick was really heavy there was no way the motor could have taken the weight of our master piece. Next day we decided to get a little experimental. Instead of bamboo we worked with PVC. It was awesome fun making it. It looked all lethal and black metal kinds by the end of it. All we used was a candle and GI wire( to make nails). Even though it had amazing acoustics. The sound wasn't good enough.
Besides working on the installation i was helping others figuring out their circuit and writing programs for them. Each project had an entirely different mechanism it and had to be started from the scratch ( learned this from victor) rather than just hacking into an already written program. While dealing with all this i did actually master and learned few basic things one needs to take under consideration when working with hardware as well as while programming it. I learned a lot and as i had to refer to arduino forums i came across some brilliant work.
Week 7: August 17- 20
It got a little boring making the same connections again and again. There wasn't much challenge left in making any of the circuits. I think by now i have soldered about 5 gas sensors already but i have no idea where they keep disappearing. I don't how authentic these gas sensors are. So far i see some random numbers jumping every time i smoke a cigarette and blow over it. I am afraid these sensors won't really work properly if we place them outside in the city. We even need to consider how many gas sensors need to be installed to get more accurate data, since the one we are using right now are so tiny and there isn't any significant change un-till and unless one blows on it directly. We might need to use some other gas sensors instead of this.
So now that we have 2 rainsticks we don't have a motor. The installation work has stopped though i really wanted to finish it by the end if this month and put it up. I definitely need more resources and tools to finish it.
I have been looking at some of the work done by people and i came across this guy who had used a RGB LED display and had done some amazing stuff with it. WE had connected the matrix to the arduino and from the serial he connected it to processing and wrote a program to reflect everything done on the processing canvas on the matrix. So it basically worked like a small screen. That was some really intense stuff.
WE need to even visualize the data which we would be uploading on pachube, for which i will have to deal with XML and all. Never done or even heard of something like this before but all i can vaguely imagine in my head is its going to be some kind of an interactive interface to get information. Right now i can think of making anything from the top of my head and the kind of examples i have seen are all bar graphs or pie charts. I am refering to this book called Visualizing Data but the XML section isn't making sense.
Week 8:August 24th-27th
VISUALIZATION:
So far i was working on it alone but Vishnu and akshitta joined in. We started by doing the visualization of every product individually and giving it a very artistic touch to it. It was atleast a begining since before this i wasn't really able to give my thoughts any form so i went with the concept. Later we realised that it is strictly for representing information and nothing else. So we started again.We were looking at this book called DATA flow which had some really intense examples but in 2-D. Some of the examples in the book were very abstract yet they were able to convey the point. By the end of the day we had 3 ideas.
- This was the first idea which was extremely simple and direct and represented data in a fairly simple way. The globe which also served as a map showed the change in the levels of pollution with a change in the gradient of the colour according to the current or stored levels. The user could scroll over the time to see the gradual change over the day or even could go to a particular date and analyze it.
Since this was our first design and that too very basic and simple it lacked various crucial points. To start with it wasn't providing enough information apart from very basic ones. The way the information was represented wasn't clear and concrete. Data couldn't wasn't free to be manipulated by the user( comparison , or viewing different categories of data together)
- This model was an upgraded version (learning from the mistakes made in the first one) showing individual pollutant levels, at a certain time, with just clicking on the location.
Therefore, with just one click, the viewer gets all his information. There was an argument about whether the interactive element was lacking, and the viewer did not get to 'discover' information as he goes along. The option to compare between pollution at different locations.
- The key element of interactivity and giving the control to the user to navigate his way through the information was the prime objective i kept in mind before drawing out my idea for the visualization.This model dealt with the interactive and comparitive aspect of data visualization. It reveals only the level of information that one wishes to see. In order to get more than the basic level of information one has to click and navigate to a different window which provides details. The bar graphs on the visual can be clicked to obtain greater detail about a certain pollutant. This model works in real time and attempts at a realistic image of the location at which sensors are placed.
Key elements:
-Interactivity
-Comparisons between pollutants in different places
-Date and Time
-Location
-Colour coding
FINAL VISUALIZATION: This model took all the key points into consideration. We took the working elements of each iteration and created this model, which was interactive, as well gave the viewer an option to compare. On clicking a location on the map, a circular chart for that location pops up, which allows the user to interact with it to get the required information. Also, these individual charts for each location can be moved around the screen, zoomed into, copied, as per the users convenience and requirements.
Week 9:September 1st-4th
SO now that we had decided and had a clear cut idea about the visualization which had all the key elements such as interactivity and everything else it became a bit to complex to finally program it. Using processing to make something like this seemed really hectic. I searched for other tools which could be used to do this work. I saw some similar work done on flash using action scripting. I tried searching for some tutorials online. It so happens that Action Script 3 along with Flex is the easiest option to do data visualization work. Plus it would be easier to add XML on flex.
We got new parts which included the LED scroll and the servo i always wanted.
Opened the scroll and it turns out there is no way we could hack it. It a nice piece but pretty complicated. Since it was meant for cars it didn't have a normal plug or anything.
So i started with powering it.
Which was pretty easy.
NEXT i didn't know what to do with it.
Only thing which we could do was to hack the remote and use infra red pulses to display the data on the screen.
By the end of the week i met Palash and he suggested some books i could use to learn action scripting. He had a PDF or something which he promised to mail to me.
Week 10:September 7th - 10th
Nothing much is happening. Flex and action scripting turn out to be way more complicated. The entire language is based on classes and objects. Something i have never indulged into before though i knew about it. I used to always work with functions and some how they are totally dependent on classes in this freaking language. Action scripting 3 individually makes sense but as soon as you bring it into flex it feels like an alien language. Flex seems to vast and i doubt i would be able to master it in few days.
So now that 4th years are gone. Only the t-shirt, oxygen pump and the Traffic signal project is left to be worked upon. Traffic signal is more or less sorted expect for the fact they don't have a proper display. Worked with the T-shirt group helped them make it visually better. Worked out the fading or rather change in the gradient from green to red which took a lot of effort but in the end was a very basic three line code which i kind of ignored before. The t-shirt looks real nice now and since the colours are also proportional to the value coming from the gas sensor the switching of colour only after a certain limit is gone so one can gradually see the change as you move from less polluted areas to high.
There hasnt been much work done this week even though it is suppose to be the last week. The weather is pretty awesome makes you lazy but i have to do a lot reading and start programming (which just ruins it for you). A lot is pending and none of the prototypes are ready to be taken out. Without them there wouldn't be any data to be uploaded hence, no data will get visualized.
Fequency Detector
http://brokenremote.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/frequency-detector/
LED touch sensing
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ledtouch/index.html
Theres some pretty awesome stuff on this site.
