Final_SENSOR INPUT

This one is actually driven by the light sensor input.

Final_MANUAL INPUT

This video is the actual final product. The section of the aperture panel that is driven manually.

Developing the Prototype

At this stage I already finished the Processing software and began to manufacture the assembly parts. There was one complex part that had to be cut on CNC – the part of the frame that holds the servos which steps up in order for the blades not to clash. The good part is that the GH definition was set up in the way that everything was parametric so really no drawing or modeling was involved – just the GH code.

Single "Blade" and Servo

This is a video of a quick test. The aperture system is driven by servo motors and the "blades" of glare - reducing material are attached to the pivots / shafts of the servos. There is also software that I wrote in Processing which communicates with Arduino via Serial port and Processing Arduino-dedicated library. There are options to swich from sensor input to slider/manual input (so you can drive the aperture manually as well). For the time being the sensor input is replaced with a potentiometer (for testing purposes).

FireFly, Sensors etc...

I am skipping a bit here, but the bottom line is that I’ve been working with several types of sensors and writing Arduino code for them. I did a few exercises before hooking Arduino and sensor input to Grasshopper using the FireFly library by Andrew Payne in order to drive the geometry in there. Basically, for my thesis I was developing a curtainwall system that is driven by sun tracking device and light sensors and for the presentation in the virtual (GH) environment I used FireFly to drive the aperture motions within GH. Further on I was going to manufacture (partially) one of the panels of this curtain wall. The images here are an aggregation of the stuff that I collected over this period.

Some Progress

I haven't been really posting anything after the Hello Arduino post, but I've been making some progress in getting to know Arduino hardware and its API as well as Processing. I have been playing with LEDs for a while testing some very simple Arduino code but I won't post any images on that. Then I started playing around with the sensors because eventually the outcome of this independent study class will have to deal with analysis data driving the system. I have two sensors on me so far:
- Sound Sensor DFR0034 (from DFROBOT)
- Light Sensor from HITEC

For these quick tests I created a  simple interface in Grasshopper (as it most likely will be the choice for the virtual environment implementation at least for the thesis project), which is a status bar moving up and down according to the value that it receives. This was attempted for the purpose of testing the ability to feed the sensor values and drive geometry in real time in Grasshopper. To receive data in GH I used FireFly components released a few weeks ago by Andrew Payne. As a remark though it was running pretty slow - I'm sure it is a mistake on my side and that I didn't calibrate things well enough on either end.
Another exercise was to create a Processing interface that would be driven by sensor input transmitted from Arduino. I was trying to come up with something useful and wrote a very simple application that shows the status bar of values constantly fed by Arduino. In addition to that the voltage gets recalculated into the level of reference intensity in dB (relative to ambient environment).

Hopefully I will be back with some more stuff ASAP on the light sensor that I have.

Hello Arduino !

The actual Arduino board was shipped finally and I am extremely excited (big thanks to prof. Dietz). I have had ideas already about the project but nothing to test them on. So, hopefully now I can begin experimenting with different pieces. I went to buy some stuff like LED pins to actually test the board.
It blinks!!!