knight-wang

[knight-wang]

Pitch Proposal

The Proposal 

I will hopefully be making working Spider-Man lenses inspired by both the comics and the latest MCU films to improve my own Spider-Man cosplay. Using already existing hardware such as a teensy and Arduino I can achieve this effect by using servo motors. Although this effect can be created without the use of any electronics and can be achieved using magnets. However, I would probably stick to using Arduino/ my Teensy and prototype using the non-electronic methods.  The entire thing can be made from cardboard and you can find lots of templates online (you can also 3D print the parts but I don’t have access to a 3D printer.)

The Rationale

I want to be able to use this project to improve upon my Spider-Man cosplay and use the skills that this will help generate/improve to build future cosplays. Doing this would also appeal to a vast audience as Cosplay is an ever increasing pastime/ hobby of many people as it allows you to become whoever you want to be no matter what you look like.

The Plan

1)    Look for pre-existing templates and guides, compile a list of what I’ll need. (1-2 days)

2)     Buy what I will need, whether it be motors etc (1 day)

3)    Cut out templates/source a 3D printer (1-2 days)

4)    Attempt a quick prototype (4 days)

5)    Start on the actual mask. (10-12 days.)

6)    Add any final touches and/or details that are needed such as potential webbing.

The Risks

1)    Not having enough time to have finalised project I am happy in because of the demand of other modules.

2)    Finding the right templates that I can easily work with that go well with the costume that I already have.

3)    Adding wiring inside of the mask/face shell could reduce comfort, also try and prevent the lenses from fogging up. (They already do this.)

4)    Not buying or being able to find the right electronic components to make the lenses convincing.

5)    Biggest risk is that I have never actually made my own cosplay and usually just by them off the internet so having to actually start from scratch will be difficult.

The Legacy

If I am successful in carrying this out then I would definitely use Teensy and/or Arduino again to create/improve other cosplays that I own or use it to make myself some fancy props. I expect this project to help me develop further my skills and understanding of Arduino and being able to take existing things and expand upon them and create something new which is a useful skill to have in life.  

[knight-wang]

Eye of Agomotto

Who doesn’t love the Marvel films? Well now you can create a bit of that movie magic for yourself with the Eye of Agomotto. With two nano-servos you can open and close the eye to  reveal  a ultra-bright neopixel that sits inside. You’ll also need a high-capacity battery so you can wear it all day, I assume you’d only want to wear it all day if you were at Comic Con and not if you were going to the shops. How does this work? I hear you cry well the device constantly scans the local Wi-Fi environment and will change its pose and and the way the light works based on how it “feels” about what it finds. The creator of this project says that his lets him know his housemate is almost home because the Eye will react happily when their friends phone gets close as that is the Eyes access point.

This project is by far one of my favourites due to the fact it fits well into my pre-existing love of comic books. The whole project was created for people like me that love going to Comic Con and Cosplaying, and now people can have their own version of the Eye of Agomotto to complete their Doctor Strange Cosplay. I really like the fact that the Eye seems to react to what it detects in its virtual environment and the fact that it can actually open and close in the same way that it does within in the films. I just hope Thanos doesn’t come back to Earth looking for the time stone.

[knight-wang]

For Task 3 we had to combine Max and Arduino into one ultra-super-duper amazing project. So, for mine I decided to take what I did in Task 1 (the Thanos Snap) and make it even better by linking the light sensor from my teensy to the rate in which the video would play.  This would mean that when it is dark the video played at a normal speed and the more light you exposed the sensor to the faster the video would play. Again, doing this was surprisingly simple yet I found that it was still super effective and has many more applications.

[knight-wang]

World’s first digital art museum lights up Tokyo, Japan.

This museum was made to increase people’s interest in art by immersing themselves in the different pieces of art. The theme of the museum is borderless, so all the artworks flow into one another seamlessly. I’ve never really liked museums as I always thought that they were boring. Apart from the London science museum which has only been redeemed in my eyes by their interactive exhibits. So, seeing this does kind of make me appreciate art/ museums a little more. I really enjoy how relaxing it all looks and the best part by far is definitely the trampoline exhibit that sends out ripples every time you land. (Who doesn’t love trampolines?)

The creators behind this project have many other exhibits like this one that all work in similar ways. The team are all made up artists, programmers and CG animators. Their entire goal is to explore the relationship between the self and the world and create new perceptions through art. They have some permanent works across the world such as in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and San Francisco. It makes sense for their creations to be permanent as they all seem like intricate pieces of art that would be difficult to get up and running all the time in different locations.

I’ve already said that I quite like this project because it is making museums more interesting than just looking at stationary pieces, however it is not my favourite project because of my distaste of museums.

[knight-wang]

Cat Dissuader

I know my last post was also about cats but this one made me laugh simply because of why it was made. I’ll leave the why until last for once just so there is some mystery behind it all. Anyway, the project created by the user jsc on Hackaday.io. The project makes use of a water squirting mechanism and a PIR motion detector sensor. According to the user PIR modules are cheap and it is interfacing them is straight forward. One of his prototypes involved using a servo on a spray bottle but he decided that that wouldn’t  work. His second idea involved a super soaker, he bought one from Toys R Us so he could use its piston pump. He wanted to keep the water gun intact so didn’t disassemble it. They also wanted to try servoing the trigger, but it was too heavy, and the trigger was too hard to design around so instead he opted to print a replacement battery pack and control the power. He can switch the power through a relay, and it all works from various angles.

I really like the sound of this project because it sounds like exactly like the type of thing we need to do for this module, so it’s interesting to see what can be done and how the person went about making the project. Now onto the why this project was made, the whole reason behind this was so they had a way to stop their cat pooping in their bathtub.

[knight-wang]

For this task we looked at framework hardware in the form of Arduino and a Teensy. The setup involved using a dial and a light sensor. I then coded the Teensy to be able to change certain values on a computer this then meant I could open a music editing software called Ableton. This software let me connect to my Teensy and use it to change values in Ableton. I connected the volume control to the dial, so it was easy to change the volume and connected the light sensor to the pitch setting. This meant that depending on how much light there was the higher the sound would become higher and if you covered the light sensor the sound would become deeper.

[knight-wang]

Laser Turret for Your Cat

Using an Arduino UNO, a SG90 Micro-servo motor and a generic joystick, MrBotBreak created a laser for your cat. The joystick controls the direction of the laser so you can constantly annoy your cat and play with them without having to constantly be using laser pointer pen. The project just uses stuff that can easily be bought and MrBotBreak even provided the lines of code that he used, so anyone can recreate this project at home. I found the project on the Arduino website where there are lots of similar projects available with guides on how to get similar results as MrBotBreak. The whole website as whole seems like it would be extremely useful for any future projects that uses Arduino as you can look at what other people have done and see their guides.

I think this laser turret would be both useful and fun to use. It would be useful especially if your cat likes to sit on whilst your typing things like right now. But it could also create a couple of hours of fun and distraction for both you and the cat.I would find this especially useful/ fun because my cat constantly sits on me when I am trying to do work, and he make it increasingly difficult to type as he always sits on one of my arms. So, to have something like this that I can quickly and easily distract him with would be extremely useful which is exactly why this project was created.

[knight-wang]

Metal Iron Man Helmet with Heads up display

Hacksmith Industries bought a metal iron man helmet that was fully functioning and opened and closed using servo motors. It also had LEDs in the eyes, so they still had the same blue glow from the films. He then used a raspberry pi to make his own heads up display for it. For his first prototype he took apart a heads up display that was originally meant to be mounted on a pair of glasses, he did this so then it would fit inside the metallic Iron Man helmet.  The main goal however was to have more of a VR helmet effect with a 360-view incorporating AR. The whole reason he decided to do this was so he could make the first ever fully functioning metallic Iron Man helmet. The use of the servomotors inside the helmet is also really cool as it means the faceplate is able to automatically raise and lower itself.

I think this could be the best project that I have looked at because it is heavily tied to my love of comic books. I’m also a big fan of the Hacksmith Youtube channel anyway as I find all of the things that he does entertaining as the vast majority of his projects appeal to my love of all things sci-fi. What I especially like about this one is that it’s actually made out of metal so it has more durability than the standard helmet, also it always kind of seemed impossible to me that something like an Iron Man armour could exist so seeing him make this just fills me with some kind of childhood like joy.

[knight-wang]

Dark Souls with Bananas

This one is really cool. Super Louis 64- Controller Bender completed Dark Souls 3 with nothing but bananas. Each banana was set up to have a different purpose, so there was an attack button and a dodge button for example. He had previously completed Dark Souls with bananas for charity back in 2017 and decided to do it again in 2020. He managed to raise $700 for charity. The entire point of this project is just to prove that you can wire bananas to play a videogame with and to also raise money for charity.

I think that this whole thing is really impressive, because not only do you have to put a load of wires into some bananas, but you have to remember which banana does what. Also, Dark Souls is notoriously difficult so to be able to complete it not once but twice with nothing but bananas is really cool. Turning bananas into a controller is something that seems relatively easy thing to do with something called a Makey Makey kit. These basically give you a circuit board, a USB cable and some alligator clips. The USB powers the circuit board and the alligator clips allows electricity to things that can conduct electricity such as bananas. So, the more impressive part about this project to me is the beating Dark Souls 3 with bananas and not the fact he turned bananas into controllers.

[knight-wang]

Africa By Toto In Animal Crossing

Mako Ray and their friends all gathered inside their animal crossing home with a plethora of different in game musical instruments. Their goal was to replicate the song Africa by Toto and they succeeded in making a pretty much perfect rendition of the famous song. It’s very impressive how they managed to do this with only the instruments that you can find in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.  All they did was interact with the different instruments in time with one another yet still managed to create a real piece of music. The instruments aren’t even a big part of the main game either and mainly act as decorations for your house. The main purpose behind Animal Crossing is to relax as you build up your town and do various other side activities such as planting trees, fishing, and befriending your many villagers.

I really like this project because of how simple it seems to be, and I imagine that a lot of practice had to go in to perfecting the song and to make it sound as accurate as possible. I’ve never really seen anything quite like this before so think that it is really impressive to have turned Animal Crossing into a music making game, especially since Animal Crossing is normally about just building a town and chatting to the many villagers. I’m not normally interested in Animal Crossing, but this project really changed my opinion on the game and really shows how much depth there is to it.

[knight-wang]

Interactive Mirror

The interactive mirror was made by Ryan Nelman. The mirror displays the date and time along with the current temperature. The mirror also lets you play music through it with a play/pause button in the bottom left corner. You can control the volume of the music by placing two fingers against the mirror and either sliding them up and down, whether you want to volume to increase or decrease. There are also some supported apps for the mirror such as photos, messages and reddit. The mirror is able to play videos that you can move around the screen, so they don’t obstruct your view if you are getting ready in front of the mirror. You are also able to control the temperature in your home and if you are running late then you can order an uber through the mirror, to get you to where you want to go on time.

Nelman most likely created this to essentially have all the important parts of a phone up on a mirror to help him/other people to get ready when they’re going out quicker. It is much easier to get ready in front of a mirror that lets you play music and scroll through reddit instead of always having to look at your phone. The user interface seemed very straight forward and easy to use with everything being big and clear on the mirror.

I really liked this project as it reminds me of something from a sci-fi film and has real usefulness in the real world would definitely make any morning routine a lot more fun and entertaining.

[knight-wang]

For this task I decided to do a little interactive experience where if you click your fingers a video will start playing and if you snap them again then it will pause. Because I had decided to do this, I thought what better video to use than the aftermath of the Thanos snap. I thought this would be the best video to use for this as it makes whoever snaps feel like they are wiping out half of reality. This was surprisingly easy to do as I just took what we had learnt in parts one and two of the Max tutorial lectures and combined them to make one even better cooler thing.

I connected a ezadc a meter and a past object alongside a counter number and a sel to a standard Max video set up to be able to create this effect. This was a simpler set up to what we did in the lecture to make the Mario theme tune because I didn’t need a lot of it and just wanted my laptop to know that when I clicked my fingers it had to play/pause the video depending on what number the snap was related to. (There’s a picture of the setup that’ll explain it a lot better than I did.)

[knight-wang]

Dreams was created by Media Molecule and allows you to create whatever you want, using pre-existing assets that the developers have put into the game. Your creations are only limited by what you can think of you don’t have to just make a game, people have made music videos or films. Lots of people have recreated older games such as all of Fallout 4 complete with the same music and menu from the actual game. Capturing the essence of the game. This project was most likely made to show off the creators skills to other developers out there as it would make an impressive addition to their CV if they could show this is what they managed to make on their PS4. They also probably chose to recreate Fallout 4 because it is a game they like, and it is well known enough that even casual fans of the game could recognise the iconic scenes that were recreated within Dreams.

I’m not really a big fan of the Fallout games because I think they’re a bit boring and dull to look at. However, I do find it impressive that this person managed to recreate it in Dreams, so I do like the overall project. I also enjoy Dreams as a concept as it allows for unique creations, however a lot of the creations on there are not as good as the Fallout 4 one and get boring quite easily and need further development to be as enjoyable as this Fallout 4 project.

[knight-wang]

Introduction

Welcome to my research folio.  I will be covering various projects that use some of the following: Existing Hardware, Existing Software, Framework Hardware and finally Framework Software.  I will be looking at these categories to eventually create my own project that focuses in on one of the previously mentioned categories.  This will help me develop real world skills to help me out in future endeavours I will look at a range of sources as well, such as the Arduino website, YouTube and Behance. I will also be looking at the Padlet map that we created as a course as inspiration as to what to look at and where to find things.

At the moment I am quite into storytelling to do something like that would be fun to do as I would find it entertaining and I could entertain others. Another thing I quite looking at and sometimes doing is cosplay. So, to create a cosplay costume that incorporates some of these features would amazing, as I have always been amazed by other people’s cosplays that have cool features (such as Iron Man costumes that have a working visor etc.) If I could create something like that I would love it as it would make me feel like the Superhero I have always wanted to be, it would feel like I was Tony Stark or Batman making my own suit with whatever I can get my hands on. (it’s a dream of mine don’t judge me.)