agproject2

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Finished Piece

Today, we assembled the final artefact within CIT and invited some students from nearby classrooms to come and try the project.

The video above shows how the finished piece looked and performed, encompassing all of the previous work that was carried during the project’s development, resulting in this final artefact.

Overall, we feel that we had successfully achieved the goals that we had established during the development process, and that the finished piece looked and functioned as intended.

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Behind the scenes footage of our Data Visualisation being set up in the Dark room on campus.

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Making a Housing for the Control Knobs

We originally thought about embedding the control knobs for the project into the plinth. However the spindles on the potentiometers were not long enough so we came up with an idea to make some sort of a control panel as minimal as possible.

 After an attempt with balsa wood failed I thought improvise with a container from a packet of chocolates that I brought from home. The lid could be used to house the potentiometers while not exposing any wires.

I started by drilling two holes with a Dremel  and after test fitting the potentiometers, I proceed to paint the lid with some spray paint from one of my other projects. Robyn also had a the great idea of spraying on the inside since the lid was clear plastic. This would also prevent the possibility of scratching off paint. Spraying was done in the C-block where there was a fume extraction box to get rid of any toxic or overpowering fumes and smells.

Next was putting in the potentiometers. Luckily they had a build in nut and thread so all we had to do was tighten them down onto the lid. Robyn made two knobs for the potentiometers and we then slid them onto the spindles. 

Next was the wiring. I also brought in some male to female jumper wires and connected them from the potentiometers to the Arduino. Like the speaker and amp, these wires had to be extended to reach the Arduino under the top of the plinth. Each wire ended up being three jumper wires long. 

Lastly, we drilled a hole in the plinth and passed the wires through down to the breadboard and Arduino.  Once everything was then connected, we used blue-tac to stick down the new control housing.

The improvised control housing worked out very well in the end. The housing stayed in place and it kept both potentiometers in place with no twisting and no wires falling off taking place.

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Data Visualisation Day

Unfortunately today we discovered that the bowl we had bought didn’t work with our data visualisation as it didn’t allow the vibrations to pass through from the speaker into the water. Luckily Paul had a small plastic bowl that did transport the vibrations from the speaker to the water. So we decided to spray paint it a colour that matched our plinth. We then created housing for the potentiometers out of a Ferrero Roche lid and spray painted that too. Once this dried we assembled our Data Visualisation piece in the Dark room and had people from other years of Multimedia test it.

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Finalised Code and Audio

In preparation for the final artefact demonstration, the final changes to the code have been made and the audio files for both the rain and tones have been added.

The video above shows the finished working solution, without it being presented in its final design.

The finalised Arduino and Processing sketches can be downloaded from here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BwSXuU0YwXdyb1RLSHBfNmk5RWs?usp=sharing

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Preparing Speaker & Amp for Final Assembly

One of the remaining things left in the project to do was to bring all of the parts left and assemble the project. The plinth was built by Sinead and Robyn and the design took the dimensions of the amp and speaker into account which I gave them prior to building.

Before we put the entire working project together I test fitted the amp and speaker in the plinth and everything fit perfectly. All I had to do was extend the wires connecting the speaker and amp.

I didn’t want to make any permanent changes to the wiring of the amp and speaker so I decided to come up with a semi-permanent way of connecting the two without altering the original wiring.

My idea was to make two extension wires with male and female connectors at both ends of the wire same as the speaker and amp wire connectors but when I had no similar connectors at my disposal, I decided to improvise.

First I took the wires out of a power cord from a previous broken power tool and stripped both ends of the wire.

Next I found some wire contacts that could be screwed down but coincidentally fit into the female wire connectors in the amp. I then just twisted off one end of each wire and clapped the connectors onto one end of each wire.

And for the speaker side of the wire I just fed the stripped extension wire through the holes in the speaker contacts, twisted them of and covered the exposed contacts with some heat shrink. 

The wiring between the amp and the speaker have been is now 80 centimetres longer than the original which in turn give us more flexibility putting the final project piece together.

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Above is a close-up image of the potentiometer knobs I made for the artefact. They were created using a drill and an extension which formed the outer edge. Both knobs fit perfectly on the potentiometers. I painted each one a different colour so as to make it clearer to the user that each had a different use. 

Below is a finished image of the artefact before the Arduino set was added. As you can see, the hole in the top piece was cut to fit the wide bowl perfectly. Once it was discovered that we would not be able to use this bowl in the finished piece, it was replaced with a smaller plastic dish. While this dish did leave a gap between itself and the wooden lid, the team were very happy with how the finished piece looked. 

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Here you can see the current build. I will update this blog tonight with my finished build work.

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Phase 2 | Design

Today I began to create our plinth. What I needed to make it:

Three of the 1.5x3.5ft MDF sides that are pictured in the previous post

One 1.5x1.5ft of MDF

One 2x1.5ft MDF

Nails (about 12)

2 Metal corner brackets 

Bowl

The 2x1.5ft MDF is being used as the top of our plinth and it needed to be cut down to the right size. Bellow you can see it being cut to size by my lovely assistant.

Once this was done, I drew a border of 1.8cm in width. This would be used as a guide to create a lip that would secure the top lid onto the plinth. This top side needs to be free from the plinth so we can take it off like a lid to place our speaker and equipment inside. Once I did that, I then found the centre of the lid by drawing two lines from each corner that met in the middle. Robyn is working on the rest of this lid, she will be cutting out the circle space for our bowl and the space for our two potentiometers. Bellow are two images of the guides I drew onto the MDF lid.

My next step was to create a three sided plinth. To do so, I needed to screw them together. Using a drill, I formed holes along the edge of the 3.5ft sides. I then screwing the sides together. Inside the plinth, at the bottom, I used metal corner brackets to further strengthen the plinth sides. Bellow are some images of the process.

Once that was done I placed the lid on top and the bowl to get a general feel for the product. This is similar to what the finished product will look like.

I will upload a video which will follow this post. This evening I will add the shelf. In the image above you can see the guide I have drawn on the left side of the plinth. This is where the shelf will be. However I wanted to make sure before I did anything irreversible. I am getting an exact measurement today in college of the height of the bowl + speaker so I know how high up the shelf should be. Paul is bringing in the speaker so I can measure the two elements together. 

Today I gave Robyn the top lid and an extra piece of MDF that we had left over. 

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Final Rain Sounds

Below I have placed the link to the finished rain sounds. The order in which they are to played is a-b-c-.........-z-aa-aj. 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B14OEGCv6MedQ1p0OHVlSjhwSlU?usp=sharing

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Phase 1 | Design

Today Robyn and myself took a trip to B&Q to buy our materials. Our design is very minimilistic because we want the focus of our data visualisation to be on the data it’s self, not the look. We are creating a plinth that stands at 3.5ft tall. In the centre is our water feature which is housed in a clear dish allowing the viewer to get a side view and top view of the waters reaction to the data inputted.

You can see exactly what each elements purpose is in the pictures above. I have also attached their sizes.

The next step is to build our plinth, paint and test.

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Creating the Rain Sounds

When creating the sounds, I originally downloaded a number of audio files from the internet and ordered them by intensity to try and create a gradient effect. However, this did not give the effect that we were after so I decided to create the sound files myself by layering a number of different sounds over eachother and adjusting gain. 

Once I had established the number of sound files I needed (37), I began with the softest sound of the bunch. This sound would be played during the months that received the least rainfall. I created this sound by looping a single raindrop “ploop” sound, so that it would play once every second. For the next bracket, this same sound would play twice every second, and for the third, four times per second. I then, for the next few brackets, brought in the sound of a light shower and in each track I increased the gain by +3 every time, starting at 0.  

Below I have attached the checklist I used to keep track of the layers and the levels of each track.

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Here is the visual result from the cornflour, food dye and water solution. The two main drawbacks were that the solution always would require stirring periodically and the other was that the cloudy solution did not represent rain water as accurately as the clear water with the food dye did.

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Testing with Different Liquids

So far we have been doing all of our testing with water as the chosen liquid. We have tried blue food dye with the water but we have never tested liquids of different viscosities so I’ve decided to further test the two.

Food Dye

The last blue food dye I used had more of an inky shade of blue rather than a shade you associate with water. Recent I picked up another brand of blue food dye from Tesco and tested that with the water and I was much happier with the results.

This brand of dye had more of a aqua-marine or teal colour instead of the inky shade of the previous brand. It also look much nicer than plain old clear water when it was in a bright coloured or clear dish and some of the finer ripples could be seen better.

Cornflour

I also tried testing with the viscosity of the liquid that would go on top of the speaker so I tried out cornflower and water with some blue dye. My first mix was interesting. It made the water a cloudy blue colour and when you played the tones through the speaker, the water and dye could almost separate from the cornflour, making extra visual effect.

The next one I tried was trying to make the solution gooey like custard or paint. I then tested that but I ended up having no visual result until it was almost the same solution proportions as the first test.

Chosen Liquid

In the end I chose just the regular water with the Tesco brand of food dye. I think that it also represent water much better than the blue milky cornflour solution. After leaving the cornflour solution sit for a while the cornflour sank to the bottom of the dish and separated from the water, which would continuously need re-stirring.

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Audio Process

As a way of figuring out how many audio file we needed, I set up an excel sheet and marked in how many times each rainfall amount occurred and when. By doing this, I could group together the values that are close together, and this way we would not need to create 130 different rain sounds. 

Once I had each rainfall value marked out, I could then go about dividing the list of values (15-241) into equal sections. Once this was done, it was clear that some sections had 5 or more occurrences, while others had 1 or 0. I then resized each section to make each one contain roughly 4 occurrences (i.e. no sound would play more than 4 times in the entire play through of the experience). 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OOmYgISBaGPj-BSs74SdLcIdnl5yfrF873IqXhsO-oY/edit#gid=0 

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The layout of the working DIY projector, because room light is on you can't see the projection.

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Testing the possibility of using a projector to display month and year on the surface of the water

Stage 1

Above is footage of my DIY projector. The Quality is very bad as I couldn’t pick up the projection through my camera so I had to up the brightness. The purpose of this little project was to see if it is possible to project onto a waters surface. This is only stage 1, where I was just attempting to project on a white wall. 

Once I figure out if you can project successfully onto waters surface, I will source a proper projector and begin designing the interface that displays the month and year.

How I made this:

Using a shoe box, magnifying lenses and my phone. Video footage of projector to follow.

Stage 2

After testing projections onto the water, it didn’t seem to be the most effective way of displaying the month and year the user is currently viewing as it was distorted by water ripples. Instead we decided to project the month and year directly onto a white background that sits at eye level to the person using our data visualisation. Allowing them to focus more on the ripples and rain sound than on the month and year. To find out they simple would have to look up for a few seconds, making the visual and auditory experience more important.