I am Sidd's blog

KOTH (King of the Hill) An alternate reality game based in Plymouth University loosely based on the popular king of the hill game. It’s also very loosely based on the app Foursquare, which lets you keep track of places you’ve been and rewards you for visiting related places. The game will split the campus up into zones with players competing over control of those zones. Each zone will have a physical capture point. The capture point will be a web-capable arduino with a screen embedded into the environment. The game will take place entirely in the digital world through one’s smartphone. A player must first register themselves as a player on the web application. Then they must log onto the web app through their phone. Following this the player approaches a capture point with a numerical code displayed on it's screen. The player (Player 1 in this example) enters this number into the web app on their smartphone. This declares that Player 1 has successfully captured the zone - thi...

So the presentation went pretty well. After a little calibration with our 'garbage simulation ballasts' the system worked extremely well. It worked consistently and reliably. Here's us tinkering with the system with our chosen ballasts, cans of cool refreshing Coca Cola ™ . Here's us doing some last-minute tinkering: And here's a link to the presentation:  http://goo.gl/NW0Hgt Overall I felt the presentation went really well. I think we conveyed the idea fairly effectively and the demo went off without a hitch. One thing we probably should have elaborated on a bit more was the reward system.  Some future improvements to the system include: Weekly or monthly scores. While doing it live is pretty cool, it can be wildly unreliable as it relies on the trash currently in the bin, which can vary so much. However averaging it over a longer period of time would produce a nice average score over the course of a longer, more representative timeframe/ Developi...

To to begin development on this project we needed to sort out how we'd measure the content on the bins. One of the ideas was to use the ultrasound distance sensors on the lids to see how high the bins had piled up. However Mike mentioned to us that another group were already using this. Feeling the way to go was weight we asked Mike if DAT had any weight sensors. Alas not. Mike did say DAT had some force sensors though. These were similar to the ones we'd used for Coffee. It was interesting to work our the pressure sensors. I wired them up and they looked something like this: Once this was wired up I used the serial connection to monitor the values coming from each. Unfortunately the force sensitive resistors were both reading different values, with one of them having total inconsistency and acting rather sporadically. After bashing my head against this, rewiring and rewriting the code and getting nowhere I enlisted the help of one of my housemates, Simon - a robotics st...

So we were given the brief for this IBM Smarter Planet Project. To begin with we were pretty confident about this. Pretty quickly coming up with the idea of using Arduino to remotely control volume of an Hi-Fi. However this was very quickly dismissed once we further understood the scope of the project, and how this didn't really fit the brief. We struggled pretty hard for the rest of the session to come up with a viable project. Instead making a Heliduino: The tutorial portion of the workshop was pretty cool. Chris Hunt and the IBM lads were showing us how to use Node Red, an IBM developed open-source webapp that lets you take inputs, manipulate them and connect them to outputs. Really simple concept, and pretty well implemented. I learned quickly how this Node Red thing worked, and it was pretty cool as it was based on Node JS, which is something I'm keen on learning anyway. We all met up in the next session where we struggled just as much to come up with ideas. We...

We brought all the kit in to do the presentation with and did a decent amount of testing beforehand and all seemed to work pretty well. Here's a link to the presentation:  http://goo.gl/nIrJAz The demo went okay. I feel as though we didn't communicate well enough the wireless aspect of it. The two Arduinos were messaging each other using MQTT over WiFi and the internet. However as both were plugged into my laptop for power, it wasn't really something that we felt was demonstrates effectively. There was also one hiccup with a portion of the demo, which was when I hit the keyboard I dislodged the sensor from the bottom of the keyboard. Meaning when Jamie went to do his portion of demo - to demonstrate profiles - it didn't detect the hit. It all worked fine when we put it back in place though. Another issue was that because we used the speakers that DAT had, they didn't work immediately when powered they went from off straight to standby, so the music didn't pl...

So far we have four individual elements: Two personalized drink receptacles: one mug, one glass The coaster that profiles users based on the mug/glass placed upon it. The keyboard with the force sensor that can detect when a user slams their fist on it. The servo-powered remote which can turn up to two mains devices on and off.   Now the next step of development is to link them all together to form the constellation. So we have two Arduinos, each with their own WiFi shield. Chris ran a workshop on using the MQTT protocol to get devices to talk to each other which was extremely helpful - it's definitely something I'll be using in my final project. So we got the two Arduinos working with WiFi and got them connected up to Chris' message broker. I hooked up the force-sensitive-keyboard to the Arduino. I then hooked up the servo-remote to the Same Arduino. I used the keyboard hit as a switch to call a function which effectively used the servo to hit and hold a button o...

The idea was to modify this shared environment to be able to accommodate different people, and do do this we needed to profile different people as they sit and begin their day. We dabbled around using different methods of profiling. A weight-sensor on a chair that was calibrated the users was one of the discarded ideas. We settled on profiling using the individuals' drink receptacles; when working we established that each individual has their own mug/glass. We thought a good way to implement this would be using RFID stickers, or tags stuck to the bottom of each mug/glass. The RFID reader would be disguised inside an object you'd expect to find in an office environment - the coaster. To the user this would, in theory, appear seamless. They take their usual mug, and place it on a coaster. This everyday action would profile the user. Unfortunately there were no available RFID readers in the DAT supply cupboard. We thought the idea was sound, so we wanted to keep the mug and coas...

So here I am catching up on this blog. We were given our project brief. The idea was to create some sort of 'constellation' made up of everyday objects that talk to each other. Gianni showed us loads of examples. The way I understood the project is to take a bunch of everyday household items that can mean different things to different people, generally in emotional or sentimental value. Using this constellation of objects we needed to create a sort of embedded system that does and means different things for different people depending on your relationship with the objects. The space we chose for this project was the office/home office environment, specifically a shared desk. We actually came up with the idea rather quickly on this one. We didn't spend as much time as we did in the previous project deliberating on past ideas and projects.  So anyway, the idea. Now when we're working we all agreed that we all get pretty stressed at certain points and need to ba...

So we did our presentation and it all seemed to work rather well. Alas we didn't have time to prepare for the presentation as I would have liked. The slides were fine, but we didn't prepare for who talks about what, when enough. Here's a link to the presentation: http://goo.gl/gNmtdQ The demo went rather well. Everything functioned as expected. The cards scanned and as if by magic, the respective names appeared and disappeared on the 'Fountain Zone' on the website. The appropriate LEDs also lit up on the model to signify the location of the cardholder's friends around the park. As this was a more of a 'proof of concept' project there are plenty of ideas we didn't apply that would be great for actual implementation. Instead of having to scan RFID cards in set locations, we could use active RFID or iBeacons. This kind of technology allows tracking to be performed without the need to manually scan in and out, as you can be location tracked in ...

After borrowing the appropriate kit from DAT we set after creating the technical side of the system. We used the following components in the process: Arduino with wifly sheild Parallax RFID reader 2x RFID cards The first thing to get working was the RFID reader. Using the reader's Arduino library I managed to get the reader reading the two RFID cards reliably and wrote an identification script. This script named the two cards and handled check-ins and check-outs, along with letting the person who scanned the card know if their 'friend' is also checked in. I added in a couple LEDs for visual feedback. Here's a demo of it in action:  Once this was done it was time to begin connecting the wifi. After many, many technical issues with the wifly shield I decided to try an ethernet shield instead, which worked great. Much testing was done to test the connectivity's robustness. However for reasons I couldn't figure out the connectivity was lost after s...

So after further discussion we're all pretty happy with the idea. We've started getting together a solid list of stuff together, doing a bit of research we've decided on using Beaumont Park as a suitable space for our project. Julia and Matt went down to Beaumont Park and took a couple of pictures, which Julia photoshopped into mockups of the space.

We brainstormed about aiding OAPs in methods of transport, help in the care home or socializing. We ended up settling on socializing as that is one of the most important aspects of our lives, and one of the moral boosting, uplifting aspects of growing old. Having & making friends and engaging in the community. After much discussion we came up with the idea of creating a public space in which there are different areas. Each of these areas has a distinctive digital presence. Users can visit the park and using their unique RFID enabled object they can 'check in' to these defined areas in the park. It gets stored in a database that you've checked into one of the areas. The idea's shaping up to be slightly similar to Foursquare, but on a small scale, and without the fiddly smartphone interface.

So we were given our project brief today. It's a joint project with the Spatial Design course at the university. We're tasked to create a space incorporating the 'Internet of things' ideology. The space must for the benefit and take into account the needs of OAPs. Primarily thinking about our own needs, were we 50 years older. After meeting our designers we initiated the brainstorming process thinking about what we would like in life 50 years on. we came up with a plethora of ideas, but most of them vague and not entirely fitting the brief.