We spent today play-testing our projects with another class and received some valuable feedback! At this point we have the visualization Swapna created for her ICM final and have been saving data so we can make this connection clear, but we haven’t completed construction of the mechanism. The data collection is a huge part of […]

Our API is live!!! It updates every minute. We are getting good overnight voltage data for our CO2 sensor which will help us get *real* ppm values, which are currently based on a zero-point voltage and drop voltage that is clearly under-calculating co2 ppm values. We haven’t gathered enough days of data to fully calibrate […]

Initial interaction: distance sensors & motor So far the most complicated aspect of our project has been determining the mechanism to turn the plant! We’ve experimented a lot at the advice of our peers, Making Things Move, and Ben Light. First, we tested with a lazy susan, some gears, and a 360 servo motor. We figured […]

This week Swapna and I finalized our proposal, and developed the bill of materials, timeline, and system diagrams necessary to complete the project. Project Description Short: A coin-operated responsive plant that rotates to acknowledge human presence and a visualization of the CO2 in its environment, that plants do the work of converting to human-breathable oxygen, […]

There were three main themes to the beyond scarcity hackathon: alternative narratives, making the invisible visible, and internalities (internalizing costs, to counter the economic concept of externalities). Swapna and I wanted to continue to explore the idea of human-plant mutualism, and teamed up with Viniyata, Andy, and Lola to create a project in a similar vein […]

For our final project Swapna and I are planning on doing a variation on my project proposal: A responsive plant that gathers and shows data about the physical environment, sensing things that are usually invisible. Specifically (for now) Co2 and EMF. We had a lot of questions about exactly how the interaction would work, which […]

I got to attend Amanda Ervin’s developing for cellular networks workshop at the Radical Networks Conference. We used the adafruit FONA cellular break out board and sent some initial texts! Working with the board requires using the FONA arduino library. It was a little tricky to get all the pinouts right, and the board communicates at […]

For my final project I’d like to create an interaction where people interact with a plant in an unexpected way. One way I thought this could work was to have the plant turn to you as you spoke to it. Another idea that I thought could scaffold nicely with this one was a speech recognition […]

For our midterm, Rushali had the great idea of sensing toilet paper use wirelessly and keeping track of it. After making a list of potential sensors that could detect movement and looking at the hardware in the bathroom, we realized that it would be hard to detect the kind toilet paper use we were interested in […]

This week we experimented with passing serial from sensors through different programs, and using serial to control things on the web or in real life! Troubleshooting I initially couldn’t get p5 to list the available ports and couldn’t figure out why since I copied the code from the lab. I went back to the code […]