© 2009 Julian. All rights reserved.
The new-to-me Nintendo DS “Personal Trainer Walking” (heck of a name..) alongside of the Japanese language game whose name I forget and cannot read. I found out about this Nintendo DS game from Kevin who found out about it from … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Ironically, a typing command user interface to do set-up stuff and manage the Flavonoid device itself. There were enough unknown variables in the design of the device and enough of my own obsession with preferences and configurations and such all, … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
I could say over design, but zealous sounds more purposeful. So, zealously over designed peculiar digital life-game controller here. Added a coin cell holder for a 3v coin cell (12mm) to keep the RTC clock going if power drops or … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
What are the boundaries of interfaces for our digital lives? Our fingers? How can the gestures we use to interact with our devices extend to create new sorts of interaction rituals and interactive experiences that go beyond the digit interface? … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
I’m in a fit of over-design. Here I am on the sixth edition of Flavonoid, which is going rather well. It does pretty much everything I would like it to do, save a proper rest mode, some little bit of … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
In the midst of trying to finish this first run of Flavonoid boards — getting the firmware right, finding little gotchas in the design, little mistakes in the assembly process — I keep flipping back and forth between thinking about … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Here’s a revamped Flavonoid configuration console. This allows easy configuration over USB. There’ll be a few more commands in here for other features and crap, especially extracting the recorded data. This harkens back to the old school VT100 style terminal … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Power. Faced with the design challenges of keeping things that don’t sleep awake as long as possible. One of the more intriguing aspects of the Flavonoid project has been to find ways that it can stay active and recording without … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
From a distance, the craftwork of prototyping speculative devices is really, really exciting to me. Thinking about design, electronics, construction, developing activated objects that actually work? That’s great. From 10 millimeters, under a jeweler’s headset with tiny, tiny 30 gauge … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Finally, something to show for this “Slow Messenger” project, a playful interface for instant messaging. I’ve gotten all the hardware bits cobbled together and most of the firmware. Now I’m working on learning how to tie in AOL Instant Messenger so that messages can be delivered to the device. Fortunately (I think) AOL has opened their API somewhat. You get some sort of key and then can create your own IM applications based on their protocol and network. I don’t know how well this works, but I suspect if it works well-enough, a preposterous projects like this should be able to make good use of it.
I found one little unexpected design glitch — the LED driver (MAX6953) and the EEPROM I’m using (AT24C1024) have the exact same ‘default’ I2C address (0×50). I stumbled across this while trying to debug why the EEPROM didn’t seem to work, even after an electrical test and crap. You can typically hard-wire the chip to take on one of another possible addresses. On the AT241024 you just wire the A1 pin to either GND or VCC and set the A1 bit of the device address either low or high. The MAX6953 has a similar deal, only a larger matrix of possible different addresses, probably because the chip will typically be found in systems with lots of MAX6953s ganged together to drive large LED displays. In my case, it’ll be easier to make some small hardware changes to the Slow Messenger display board than it’ll be to change the AT241024, which is on a generic Flavonoid board that I want to keep as identical as possible to the other one’s to make managing the firmware easier.
Strange, but I thought that I got closer to having the real-deal I’d understand more about why I’ve committed so much time to doing it. But, I’m no where near understanding why I’m doing it or what it means. This may be beyond the near future and somewhere from another planet.
I heard someone confuse the Near Future Laboratory with corporate R&D. Like, essentially assuming that what I was doing was stuff just around the bend that someone at some corporate lab or product design operation is probably better suited to develop. Whatev. The Near Future Laboratory is the other near future — the one no one in a corporate lab would really think about because the demands of commerce minimize risk, don’t even scratch their heads if the perceived market is too small, and only think about what can be realized to help make next year’s earnings look good. Just to clarify.
Technorati Tags: Near Future Laboratory, slowest instant messenger
The Economist had a short article titled Let’s Get Physical on “exergaming” — gaming that combines play with exercise. At the same time, Fabien wrote a thought-provoking blog post on the Nokia Sports Tracker and Tracing Personal Mobility. This stuff got me thinking about these weak-signals around exercise, play, gaming, fitness. I wrote a little comment on Fabien’s blog about the different ways to turn sport into electronic gaming and play in some fashion, or the challenges around that. Much work is associated with GPS or pedometers and that sort of thing, or stats-based stuff.
I wonder how far beyond the more or less obvious solutions like GPS and pedometers we can go? And then what beyond the usual stats cards and graphs?
I think that the instrumented approach to measuring activity like this is quite compelling to many fitness enthusiasts. Knowing the numbers and tracking progress through spreadsheets and graphs has its appeal for those who want to measure very detailed incremental increases in their fitness. I think that there is the possibility for re-calibrating what gets to count as “fitness” so that it has a less instrumental meaning. So, rather than fitness measured as how far you can run in what amount of time, fitness could be shaped around less self-centered characteristics, such as how much CO2 your super hero avatar prevented from escaping into the atmosphere, or how many dinosaurs you saved by avoiding turning them into the fuel from their fossils. I only say this because, plainly, the GPS thing is wonky at best as you describe. In many cases it works perfectly fine — but in the off case that it does not work well, there’s a real issue in terms of user adoption or satisfaction. If you measure physical activity more “ambiently” or with less instrumentalized rigor (sum-of-squares acceleration versus meters moved), you can tap into much less expensive techniques. Also, there’s an exciting challenge there — can we redefine the culture of fitness, tie it into the booming electronic games business — all in the service of elevating ecoawareness? It’d be like crossing the streams in Ghost Busters!
Technorati Tags: exergaming, Offline Gaming, pervasive electronic games
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Here’s the v03 Flavonoid prototype pretty much all assembled, except for attaching a battery on back and the DS1340 real-time clock and its crystal — you can see the landing pad there near the center.. I’d be surprised if this all works. I mean..something must be wrong, right?
Okay, everythings on there..now what? I basically try to test each component one at a time to see if it works. Here I’m checking the QT113H, which is a touch/proximity sensor. The sensor can detect whether the Flavonoid is being held, or is near your body. Touch/proximity interface semantics are something I’m interested in experimenting with — more than just physical contact, but nearness as well.
What I’m doing is checking to see if the sensoris working. My finger is over a contact to which will be attached a flexible probe, like a super thin wire that can be run along the inside of whatever enclosure this ends up in. So, it triggered — I can tell because my multimeter went to about 3.3v.
But, then something annoying happened..it basically locked up, the sensor. And then I remembered that when I was first experimenting with the QT113H, it had to be recalibrated, basically by cycling the power. I never really fully understood when that had to be done, but regardless — this is a problem because, well..Flavonoid has no power switch so I can’t cycle the power on the thing, even for debugging. Drat..
I threw a tri-color LED on there for debugging and diagnostics. I think I’ll probably put a surface-mount one on there in the next version.
I put an in-system programmer jack on the board so I could program it with just about any in-system programing jig. That ribbon cable there is running to my STK500 on my Windows machine, although one of these days I guess I’ll figure out how to use the rig I got for my Mac. Anyway, I use AVRStudio’s little AVR programming interface to flash the program memory from the STK500. I comple using the WinAVR (avr-gcc) tools, which works like a charm..no problems.
Okay, back to this snafu with the QT113H..basically it turns out that you can "power" the thing directly from an I/O pin on the microcontroller. It uses so little current to run, that one of the pins on the ATmega32 can supply it. So, that means I can connect the power pin of the QT113H directly to one of the port pins, which I did here with a little light gauge white wire wrap. I had to cut a trace on the board that had been the VCC supply for the QT113H. Easy peasy. Now i can power the thing up and down programmatically. So, every reset or whenever. Convenient.
Here I attached a little bit of white wire as the sensor probe for the QT113H. Works like a charm. If I hold my hand near it, it triggers the sensor.
That’s it — proximity sensor works. Did a little redesign in the original schematic.
Next, I’ll check to see if the real-timeclock is working.. Continue reading