Honours Studio 1 – Week 07/08

So a brief update on some testing I’ve been up to… first of all the Processing Android (now in official release – get it) questionnaire, which will provide parents involved in the study with a simple means to giving me feedback. Simplicity is something I want to strive for with these applications: I’d like for them to be self-explanatory where possible, and not to ever make the parents feel as though they’re being overwhelmed with technology.

And in keeping with that idea, there is no text to enter, or numbers to choose from in the questionnaire. Sliders under each question record a ‘rating’ and hitting the Send button at the bottom will forward that data to me via email. The small logo at the bottom of the screen links directly to a website with more information and help, should it be required.

In more nerd-related news, I finally busted open a Wii nunchuck over the past couple of days. Deciding that the casing was superfluous (and just take a look in there – it really is), I took the accelerometer and joystick out (the buttons got the chop). I also clipped the expansion port adapter off in favour of plugging directly into the Arduino.

With the help of Tod Kurt‘s Wiichuck Demo, I used the X and Y accelerometer values, as well as the X joystick value to control the R/G/B values of the LED respectively (code here). I popped the ethernet shield on top, fired it up with PoE and all seems to be working. Sort of…

%CODE1%

…the RGB values are clearly still quite jumpy. But that’s a fairly minor problem for what is just a quick test. What I’m hoping to do over the next week is to get a few of these ‘proof-of-concept’ ideas up and running, so that when I meet the children I will be working with (hopefully in the next couple of weeks), I already have a palette to draw from. And of course, whatever I work on before that time is only going to form the ‘brains’ of these devices. The shape each device takes will be entirely dependant on what each child already engages with.