Paja

Drawdio – a Pencil that draws sounds

The world’s deepest bin: The fun theory

Let it snow: Google Search during Christmas vacation

The Speed Camera Lottery: The fun theory

Ningen Gakki, Turn Your Body Into a Musical Instrument

Nicodama: Ryota Kuwakubo

Clocky: Nanda Home

Playble: Yumiko Tanaka

TV Wand

Many products and services requires interactions today and it has been a big challenge for designers in how to sketch ideas. Sketching on paper will not describe your idea any more as you need to illustrate experiences. This course teaches you various techniques of how you can sketch experiences by making functional prototypes. The prototype can be from wearable objects to installations. The course will provide easy-to-use and quick-to-make tools and materials. You will form groups and develop ideas based on a given theme. The groups iterate their designs through prototyping. The final prototype should be presented at Media Lab Demoday in May.

You can find student work in previous years as follows.

http://mlab.taik.fi/paja/?cat=45

If you have any question, please contact Michihito Mizutani.

Make readable data for Eagle CAD application in Illustrator

•  Only straight lines can be used. Vector will be a line when you import it to Eagle file.
• If you have vector, add anchor points repeatedly. Object > Path > Add anchor points
• Note that a line drawn only with two point will not be visible in Eagle file either. Add one more anchor point in the line (three point in total) as explained above.

Export DXF data

• Select the object in Illustrator that you want to import to Eagle.
• File > Export
• Select format as DXF and give a name to the file.
• When you press “Export”, a window pops up. Make sure Artwork Scale and AutoCad version are  correct as follows.
• 

Import DXF data in Eagle application

• Open the board view in your Eagle project
• Download dxf_polygons_v4.ulp
• File > Run
• Select the downloaded file and press open.
• File picker pops up. Select the DXF file.
• A dialog pops up. Make sure you chose WIRE and Dimension layer as follows
• If Eagle complains that the DXF is too big, Modify inser offset in the dialog.
• 

I bought a WiFly Arduino shield. This is Wifi module enable Arduino to connect to internet directly. In this post, the shield connets to Windows Phone. How exciting module it is!

Please note that this post is not yet proving that your windows phone app can communicate with Arduino. It just shows the connection is established.

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DS3234 is also a real time clock IC. It uses SPI to communicate while DS1307 does with I2C. There is a Arduino library for DS3234 to provide simple methods to set and read time. You can purchase DeadOn DS3234 RTC Breakout from Sparkfun.

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DS1307 Real time clock can tell time to Arduino. You can turn off Arduino as a small button battery is attached to the DS1307. Once you  set the right time on the DS1307, it can keep ticking up to 7 years.

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TLC 5940 PWM driver can control up to 16 LEDs. You can dim each LED separately. It also allows to cascade multiple TLC 5940 PWM driver thus you can have more than 16 LEDs multiplied with the IC. As I need 60 LEDs, I am cascading 4 of them. As I understand, it communicates with SPI with a couple of additional wires. There is a Arduino library for TLC5940 which comes with good example sketches. I have attached basic schematic and Arduino code to test multiple TLC5940.

This post describes how to create PCB with Roland Modela MDX-20 mill machine using Fritzing open souce software. The instruction using Eagle is described in another post.

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There are two ways to connect Android to Arduino over USB. They are Android Debug Bridge Mode (ADB) and Accessory Mode (ADK). ADK supports only newer Android than 2.3.4 while ADB supports even older than 2.2. A demo in this page uses ADB.

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Two cups at the top: The Cat Plum: Geraldine de Beco, Bernardaud

White cup at the bottom: Creaturecups

Making an everyday object playful.

This is our main theme for Designing Interactions with Electronic course at Media Lab Helsinki this year. The playfulness can happen in the interaction with objects. To make an everyday object playful, you need to observe and understand its usage in sequences and then think how to modify it to let people experience such a fun. During the introduction, several examples was showed to the students.

The most important thing to learn from this course is to “communicate design through prototypes”. The playfulness is such a subjective topic which you need to illustrate expected experience in some format. One of the most valuable ways to do that is to prototype the experience.

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This post describes how to develop your first QML application on Nokia N9. Unfortunately I have only instructions for Mac users but I assume the steps for other platforms are similar to this.

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I am experimenting N9 and Arduino. Since QML on N9 doesn’t support any serial communication over USB, I am using the serial communication over Bluetooth.

This post describes how you control a servo motor with N9 over Bluetooth.

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