Reflective Statement

I particularly enjoyed this project as it was dealing with something that was really quite interesting and entirely new to me and it introduced me really to very basic programming and construction. I thought it was a very creative project that allowed a lot of individuality to be shown in our designs and our final images. We did experience a few problems while building the robot, Particularly when it came to controlling our robot with music and programming in general was actually quite difficult. Both of those things were achievable with  a bit of hard work and by looking at other works both online and from the other groups and i truly found that when it came to programming the most valuable asset was our class mates that really made working through the project a lot easier. Ideas really came from everywhere from our lecturers and our classmates to just simple mistakes that actually looked quite effective. I think the only thing i can truly say i would do different next time is try to experiment with a few different materials rather than just the Mindstorm kits we were given though with our particular design it wasnt exactly necessary. I really felt that everyone really pulled together to accomplish the task we were given and everyone contributed and developed different skills when it came to developing, documenting and building the robot. Overall i felt that our robot was a huge success and i think that the art it created was really something quite unique and interesting especially to see the proccess behind the art pulls everything together, in my oppinion making every stage of our robot the real art that was created.

Days 5 and 6 - Project 1 - Thursday and Friday

Thursday was very much a day that we used to fine tune our robot and get as many photos and footage as possible for our introductory film and involved doing a completely smooth test run of the robot entirely as it was going to be done in the  presentation on friday. We filmed everything in the darkest room we could find and took a bunch of videos and photographs from different angles, These were then given to Lee to add into the video. A link will be posted soon to the video so that you can watch it. Friday came and we really went all out for our presentation, i programmed our robot to do a little dancing movement while the video played and we set the mood of the club using our U.V Lights and a strobe as well as the backing track for the video being techno. The introduction went really well and i felt we captured peoples attention quickly and effectively to get them focused on the actual demonstration of our robots programming. Unfortunately going from a smaller space into such a large area i found we actually had less sound than in the previous smaller room so a few quick adjustments had to be made with the volume and placement of the speakers but eventually all worked out well in the end. We got some quite positive feedback from both Gabriel and Kim and i really think that our group has really accomplished making a very cool Raving Drawing Robot. Below are some of the pictures we took of our final robot design and some of the drawings it made.

Pictures

Day 4 – Project 1 – Wednesday

I brought in my sound system today to get some real volume for testing the robot and it worked perfectly! The extra bass added some real spikes to the volume and gave just the right amount to keep the robot going in a straight line, we started to test different songs to see how they worked with the robot and it was quite interesting to find that different songs had different effects on the robots movement. We found that the most effective to keep our robot in a straight line was a heavy metal song called Redneck by Lamb of God, we tested this song along with some other different genres from softer acoustic sounds to fast paced techno beats all at the highest volume we could get with  the speakers. We did a couple of test runs and found a few problems with the construction of the robot and had to fix a problem with the rear ball as it kept coming loose which was quite simply done with the use of cable ties but after that we decided to get started on creating our presentation which involved a demonstration of our robot after showing a video of our build process and some footage of our robot in action. We talked to Gabriel about some possible ideas for presenting and what he thought about our idea. When we showed him some of the photos that Edrian had taken he pointed out in one particular image that he really liked the reflection of some of the light off of the floor, this was a complete accident but we decided to move off of it as another way of developing our idea once again even further. It then brought about the idea of using a mirror for our robots drawing surface. As a group we realised it was going to cost too much to get a large enough mirror for the amount of space our robot needed so decided on going for a slightly cheaper version of laminating A4 sized pieces of tin foil and piecing them together into a reflective surface that somewhat resembled a dance floor or the sides of a disco ball and used that as our canvas.

Day 3 – Project 1 - Tuesday

With our Robot built by Friday it was quite nice to be able to relax a little bit over the weekend giving me time to think about ways to improve our design and play around a little bit with Mindstorm looking at different ways of programming and also looking at a few projects that other people had worked on in the past some which were quite interesting like spider-like robots with pens as legs and paint catapult style robot that reloaded automatically before flinging different coloured paint filled water balloons at a wall creating a splatter painting. Though I thought these ideas were quite cool they didn't really help me come up with any ways to really develop our idea much further. Well after we all got in we started work straight away and I immediately set myself the task of figuring out what was wrong with the programming from the previous Friday. When it came to controlling the robot through music I had set up a basic loop that showed that once the sound sensor picked up a certain volume the robot would move forward and once the music was below that volume the robot would make a right turn. Well when we were testing the robot all we could get was the robot to go in circles because the sound of the robots own engine would activate movement but not enough to keep it going in a straight line. Even when we tried playing music through our laptops at maximum volume we couldn't get the sensor to pick up the amount of volume needed to keep the robot moving straight, now my immediate thought was to drop the amount of volume needed to get the robot going in a straight line only dropping that level meant having to decrease even more the volume that could be heard when the robot was made to spin and with the robots motor already posing a problem with the amount of noise output this posed a pretty big problem. That problem was solved quite quickly when I decided we clearly needed more volume in the music and a more powerful sound system, luckily I had just bought a new set of speakers the previous week and decided to see if they would work. Lee also had taken an interest in the idea of the clubbing scene and had seen a picture of a DJ’s turn table in a club that had been photographed with a time lapse a similar idea to one of our original robot concepts so we decided to merge the two of our original concepts into one and added on a variety of different finger lights onto the robot to give us another dimension to the art we were creating. Overall we had a productive day and our robot is really becoming quite refined giving us time to work on how we will present our idea to the class for Friday.

Day 2 – Project 1 – Friday.

The day started bright and early getting straight into building our robot again before I started working on programming the movement of the arm. Basically what we wanted to do was to have the arm arc back and forth continuously at different speeds depending on the amount of light that was detected by the light sensor. This required quite a bit of thinking when it came to working around the commands that I had through Mindstorm, though through a bit of determination and a fair bit of trial and error but I came through with the commands that were needed to get the arm to function properly and effectively. Working my way through the programming through the use of trial and error actually helped me learn a whole lot about the Mindstorm program and found that I was able to pass on what I had learned and help others with problems with their work. While I was working on the functions of the robot, Edrian was busy documenting our work taking photos and video footage of our progress, while Lee, Supa and Lucy built more onto the robot and started developing more ideas. At this point we decided to blend the 2 of our previous ideas by creating a number of different mediums that either of which could be used for any one of our final images. Im actually really impressed with the progress that the group has made so far, we all work really well together and it looks like were flying ahead of the others with an entirely built robot that i can now start openly testing different commands and functions with Mindstorm. I also like the fact that we havnt tried to be too complex with our design, we are going for a more simple but effective approach with our art combining what we already know and exploring different areas of not only Mindstorm but with the way that we approached showing our drawings. Our ideas are already developing with the way our robot will draw and be controlled with the idea of using music to change the movement and light to create a larger or smaller arc. Though these were still very simple control methods they were starting to lead us towards an idea of creating an ideal environment for the robot in our case a clubbing scene.

Day 1 – Project 1 – Thursday

After presenting our kickass knocking robot to the class, we were then given our first assessed project for the semester. We have been tasked with creating a drawing robot to create art based on interactions with an environment using different sensors and such. To be honest the idea seemed quite overwhelming at first and took me a little while to come up with a few base ideas and do some small sketches of them before taking the opportunity to break off from the previous group to get to know some new people and see how working with them would work out. I grouped up with 4 others, Edrian, Lucy, Supa and Lee and we kicked things off quite quickly and began brainstorming some quick ideas for designing our robot. I felt that we meshed really well together and quite quickly we came up with a number of ideas but only two were really considered and developed. Either a robot with an arm that moved in a central arc or a robot that creates its art using a set of lights that are captured using a DSLR camera on a slow shutter speed. Deciding on the idea of the central arm we started developing the idea deciding on what materials we would use for creating the art, choosing between white or black paper and using flouro gel pens or highlighters to create a drawing that would stand out in the dark. This brought about the idea of using a U.V light as a way of illuminating the lines drawn by the pens. At this stage we started to build our robot, starting first with our moving arm then moving on to the wheels and main body before the day came to a close. Below are some of the pictures from the build process.

Thursday Pictures

Okay so ive been a bit slack...

As you've probably noticed the past few days i haven't exactly kept up to date with my blog entries but luckily, today ive got a whole bunch of exciting stuff from the past few days that i personally found was really great.

Monday 7th March
This week started off once again arriving an hour earlier than needed to our Introduction to creative technologies lecture but once the lecture started i found myself thinking a lot about what it was that made me choose to take the course, what decisions affected me making that decision? What do i plan on achieving by the end of the course? Basically what our lecturer Maggie was trying to get us to do was really start to get our minds around the concept of thinking about the way that we think and it was actually quite an intense feeling at first as it was pushing me to really rethink about why it was that i have made the choices that i have and think about possible factors that had lead to those choices, overall a very interesting concept that i think will be quite useful. After the Lecture we had our lunch break and started our next lecture, Physical Computing. Now going into the lecture i quite honestly had no idea what to expect and to be honest at the end of it it seemed like a slightly more complex version of first year electronics at high school only with the added aspect of a computer into the mix supposedly controlling circuit flow. To be honest the lecturer Julian didn't exactly capture my interest very well for a number of reasons, his body language was screaming nervousness and he seemed like he was quite intimidated by us when talking to us as a group but also he lacked a certain spark that the previous lecturer Maggie had, another probably quite crucial factor was the fact that quite frankly it was nearing the end of the day and i was feeling physically quite tired. I didn't actually feel that i got anything out of his lecture except for the fact that next week we have to have purchased a bunch of expensive equipment just so we can make an LED flash.... sure its a starter project but spending a large amount of money on equipment for such a basic project seems a little strange and my opinion the sooner we get onto projects that actually capture our interest the better.

Tuesday 8th March
Now what an amazing day that was! We spent our day working in the studio on a group of small projects designed to get us working effectively in a team whilst collaborating creative ideas to create and develop a new chess piece. I worked in a group with Jim and Sam and originally we all had all sorts of different ideas for  characters to base our piece around and often had conflicting ideas. While our ideas conflicted we resolved the issue by taking in aspects that we liked from a variety of the characters while deciding on a piece that we all liked. It made me realise how easily such a simple task can become a lot more complicated when working in a group and ideally it made us think more and develop the design of our piece far more than any of the designs of our other pieces. Our final piece was the Reaper piece which basically was the symbol of death and the fear of death upon the battlefield and when it came to rules regarding the piece we came up with a bunch that were quite respective to that concept. The Reaper was originally considered wraith like where the restrictions of our world simply did not affect it in anyway so we took that aspect and involved that in our movement where the edge of the chess board was no longer a restriction but instead the reaper would casually flow seamlessly across from one edge of the board to the direct opposite while moving across spaces in any direction similar to that of the queen only with the restriction of only being able to move 3 squares at a time as to not make the game to unbalanced. When it came to taking pieces we decided to restrict it to only being able to take out lesser pieces more likely to be affected by the fear of death a.k.a the pawns but also the figure head of the army, the king, whom almost certainly once faced by death would cower why else would he be hidden behind his troops on the battlefield. Other pieces like the queen, knights, rooks and bishops had characteristics that allowed them to withstand the fear of death, eg. the knights bravery or the bishops faith, but were also the only pieces able to remove the reaper from play. We thought it would be appropriate that the only way that the reaper could be slain was for the opposing piece to embrace the idea of death and through self-sacrifice remove both itself and the reaper from play.

After coming up with the design we were then given LEGO Mindstorm kits to use to assemble a robot that was based upon the rules of our piece to race the following morning. So for our robot we used a very basic car shape whilst also adding in a pair of claws that could supposedly grab onto other robots and through programming allow us to then fling the robot around while it span only to laugh and pursue its next victim. With the design of our robot we tried to make it look as sinister and fearful as possible by adding lots of excess spikes and other jagged shapes. When put to the test it proved quite accurate to our rules, moving freely around without restriction and removing robots, but in order to take ours out of the race other robots had to be sacrificed to bring our rampage to a halt.

Day 3

Day 3... what an interesting day. We all arrived an hour earlier than we needed to, the entire class sat around socialising for an hour which at least gave some benefit to the early start. When our lecturers arrived to talk us through what we'd be doing for the day id already spoken to a few people including Jim who id had lunch with the day before and two other girls Lucy and Alisa and during the morning we'd somewhat come together as somewhat of a group which was then solidified as we were told to then get into groups of 4 for the start of our days adventure. We were given set roles in the group and were given a set of instructions to follow in order to accomplish the task, it didnt take us long to accomplish the task but when it comes to presenting we have spent quite a bit of time on presentation so far already and a couple of us are getting worried about whether or not our project will be ready in time for the presentations tomorrow. We are all going in early tomorrow morning to make sure that it is.

Day 2!

Well as another day at Uni has come to a close, i find myself to be really enjoying the course so far. The people are great I have met a bunch of people that i can easily relate to and quite openly discuss areas of the course as well as share personal lives and all the rest and i find myself with the makings of some cool new friends. I find it quite interesting that the age factor between classmates has been tossed aside in the course as we find ourselves all pretty much in the same boat and can connect easily through the course itself which i think is actually a really cool thing that really adds to the BCT. The beginning of our day was pretty funny really as most people printing out the graphs that we had to do the day before all ended up paying different prices for the same print, in the same store. I was one of the lucky ones paying a little less than the others but i couldnt help but feel bad for the others that felt as if they were being ripped off. Anyway we got into class and started to analyse the ways that our graphs had turned out and as a group we chose the best concept graphs to develop further before heading off to the computer lab to put our ideas into action!

After we had got started we were then quickly rushed off for our induction into the 3D lab that many of us will no doubt end up using at least once or twice if not most of the year. Now when i say 3D lab i think all sorts of high tech equipment to do with 3D modelling, 3D sculpture etc etc. Sadly, this was not the case. The 3D lab is really a glorified name for a workshop where we have access to a load of wood working and metal working tools as well as a variety of other things useful to our course. The induction was fairly standard, laying  down the rules, letting us know the safety measures required in the lab as well as a few other things key for us when using the lab, all of which really was just common sense or stuff that id heard countless times through Hard Tech and Woodworking classes through my Intermediate and Highschool years.

Overall though the day was another exciting and eventfull one that im already finding is changing the way that i look at things as well as somewhat preparing me for the amount of organisation and work that is going to be required of me through this course. Well lets keep our fingers crossed and hope that i can pull it through.

1st Day

Well heres to the first ever post on my first ever blog! Today was my first day in the creative technologies course after having a slight issue with the timetable system i find myself a day behind everyone else.... luckily through talking with James our program leader i have managed to catch up with the class and am now finally up to speed! I have to say that James's talk on visualisation today was in my oppinion very interesting as it encouraged me think more critically on the concept of visualisation as a whole and the way that our minds work. Well i figure that should be enough for a short post for today and now to get some sleep before starting day 2!