Well, with the help of the internet, I now have a star wars force trainer hooked up to an arduino. Reading minds has never been so simple and narrated by Yoda.
This is very exciting as now I can control things with my mind. I now have to work on making something to control with thought to further prove how cool this thing is.
Once again. Coolest. Toy. Ever.
Lookie what I got delivered this morning
It’s a Star Wars force trainer! Now I can control a ball with my mind.
See look it floats and everything! The best part is, I can now hack this and control things other than a ping pong ball with my mind.
Mind control is the future!
Recently, i’ve been getting bored and wanting to make things. I also stumbled upon a nice article on instructables where it detailed how to make a secret knock detector for your door. It uses an arduino and various parts and it detects the pattern of your knocks on a door. If you get it right, the door unlocks and you can walk in, if you get it wrong, nothing happens.
It intrigued me as I have some interesting ideas for my final major project next year, and this could be part of one. So I decided to see how easy it was to build.
Turns out very. After following the guide, everything worked just fine. It picked up knocking on a table and some L.E.D’s flashed to let me know I got it right or wrong and it’s pretty reliable to boot.
When you get the knock right
When you get the knock wrong.
I haven’t got the motor working yet as I don’t have the right parts to hook up a motor yet. I think. I have to look into that. His way seems very complicated as I thought you could control a motor a little bit more simply than that.
But that’s for future Jon to deal with.
I probably should have posted about this first, but i’m gonna do it now instead.
Fungineers do more than just silly iPhone apps, we also do interactive art and other nonsense. We were asked to help with a method of interaction for an animation piece. A senior lecturer in animation, Leonie, is animating a short film about a girl in a light house. The story pivots around phone calls and she wanted people to come in and select their own endings. Her initial idea was to have people use their own phone to call into the art piece. We persuaded her that this was a silly idea as no one would want to use their own phone and that it would be very, very expensive. So instead we came up with the idea of using a rotary phone and have people dial one of three numbers to select one of three endings.
We just needed to get a rotary phone to interface with a pc and have the pc know what number was dialed. For that we used a combination of an arudino and flash. Luckily, someone had already done the ground work for us and produced a tutorial on how to get an arduino to know and display a number just dialed on a rotary phone. Fantastic, we just needed to get it working with flash and have flash know when a specific string of numbers has been dialed so it can show the correct frame. For that we used some strings and arrays. Every time a number was dialed, flash would push that number into a string and then we check if that string matches up to a set telephone number.
Okay, so that all works. Now we needed the phone to cancel the call when you hang up. Well, we just took the output from the switch inside the phone and directed that straight into the arduino. We could then tell flash that when that was pressed to clear the array and send the frame back to the first frame. Genius.
Well that was the bigger part of what she wanted done, she also wanted a microphone input on another piece so that when you shout at it, it displays an animation. Well thats simple, thats just a few lines of AS3 and you check to see if it has hit a certain value or not. How fantastic is that ay?