Physical Computing - Introduction

Moving away from the screen is our focus when we start working with electronics. Being able to work with and design circuits that enable our interaction designs will give our projects a level of realism we previously did not have access to.

I hope my electronic skills will become good enough to allow me using a sketch based approach to the hardware design, in much the same manner as my drawings, and enable me to make quick iterations of the hardware needed for our final prototype. As an introduction we started with just a Bread-board and a few LEDs. Me and Silje also played with several of the photoresistors in our toolkit, great fun. Other sensors where also tested, like the pressure and bend sensors, quite amazing stuff.

Switching on the light


In a few weeks we will have a workshop with Tom Igoe. If that workshop on Pysical Computing (PC) can be compared with what we learnt in Processing from Marius Watz last semester it would be great, but i suspect we will not get that much time this time. Hopefully, since Arduino is almost the same as Processing (Java based), we can use much of that knowledge in our electronics endavour.


As a final note: We had a close call with our pet robot today. Remember do not leave random knives close to your Robot!

Close shave ..Close shave ..Close shave ..


In a stroke of luck for us it was revealed that he was a real pushover.

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