Double Arm Robot Drummer – Test 1 from Noah King on Vimeo.

I devised a simpler design to continue exploring the use of servos with robotic arms.

This design has two separate arms, each one pivoting with the intent of striking another object, making a drum sound.

This initial test was to directly control the position of the arm with the position of the potentiometer. It was successful, but would make playing successive drum beats both tedious and difficult.

Double Arm Robot Drummer – Test 2 from Noah King on Vimeo.

This second test explored a looped movement, independent of an analog control dial.

Both arms successfully looped their movement back and forth. You can see the metal cup and glass bottle in near-striking range, ready to make two unique drum sounds.

Double Arm Robot Drummer – Test 3 from Noah King on Vimeo.

This final test was largely successful, but it also identified a limitation of programming with a “for” loop.

In this setup, each arm is controlled by an analog dial, where programmatically the speed of the arm increases as the dial position increases.

In the end, this only made for two different arm velocities, but not two different rhythmic paces. Because both actions were programmed into the same “for” loop, the faster of the two arms must wait until the slower arm finishes moving, before looping into a second movement.

Although enormous progress was made on this project, a different programming strategy will be needed to get the result I want.

Robotic Arm – Test 1 from Noah King on Vimeo.

After facing enormous challenges with the DC motors, I thought I would give the servos a try. To do so, I constructed a simple robotic arm with three sections and two joints. The whole construction was cobbled together and fairly rickety, which lead to some weight and balance issues.

But the servos did work, and I liked the use of the analog dials to control the movement.

Robotic Arm – Test 2 from Noah King on Vimeo.

In this test, the robotic arm waves nicely, but still the balance was a major issue. I tried to use counter weights to keep the arm’s lower limb from bending over, but then the whole construction became too heavy and the servo was no longer powerful enough to move the second joint.

This lead to the decision to build a simpler set of arms for the next test.

Motorized Car – Test 1 from Noah King on Vimeo.

I played with remote control cars quite a bit when I was a boy, so some part of me desperately wants to be able to make my own R/C vehicle.

This first test was one of many where I ran into gearing problems. Without enough torque at the wheels, not much happens.

Motorized Car – Test 2 from Noah King on Vimeo.

In this test, I at least got one of the wheels to spin, but still there was a problem with torque and general loss of power through the gearing and mechanical construction. I want to try using real gears, rather than rubber bands, as I think it will translate the power more effectively.

Motorized Car – Test 3 from Noah King on Vimeo.

After constructing a cute little tri-cycled body, I reworked the gearing in this test. Although both wheels did spin, as soon as they were placed on a surface, the friction was too great and no movement occurred.

This was the lest of the car tests. I need to find a good gearing solution before proceeding.

Analog Sensor – LED test from Noah King on Vimeo.

This was a basic test to get an analog sensor, in this case a potentiometer, to control the brightness of an LED, much like a dimmer switch.

Single Player Pong Game – Coded in Processing from Noah King on Vimeo.

Interactice Processing Sketch
Source Code Link

Processing Drawing Program from Noah King on Vimeo.

Interactive Processing Sketch
Source Code Link

ICM Week 1 – Version B – Interactive Processing Drawing from Noah King on Vimeo.

This processing sketch explores mouse driven manipulation of an image, using variables and click-derived actions. Screen-captured with Quicktime.

Live Processing Sketch
Source Code

Physical Computing – Combination Problem from Noah King on Vimeo.

This was a solution to the problem of programming the functionality of a combination lock.

There are four buttons, pressing any one of them applies a mathematical function to a variable. After several button presses the variable becomes rather unique, so only the correct combination with “unlock” the circuit and turn the green LED on.

Source Code

Physical Computing Lab2D- Button Spinners from Noah King on Vimeo.

This concept here is to have three separate towers/motors/spinners, each one with a Red/Yellow/Blue colored wing.  By pressing different button combinations, colors optically mix and basic color theory is visualized.  This video is of a test.  Once I get a third motor and I construct some wind blades, I’ll finish up this idea.

This concept could easily be developed into a wire-controlled car, using three buttons as switches for FORWARD (both wheels spin), LEFT (only right wheel spins), and RIGHT (only left wheel spins).  Considering that the range of the car would be limited to the length of the wires, it would make some sense to use four motors, two front-facing, two rear facing (or to figure out some way to get the motor to reverse polarity through a switch) so that the car could go backwards and forwards.

Link for source code.

Without any recursion, this was quite tedious to make.

I needed to make several calculations to extract x + y coordinates on a circle.  Based off of the below grid sketch, I picked a circle size with relatively “whole” values.  sq(x)+sq(y)=sq(Radius)

Original Processing Sketch

Source code: ICM_week1_A

Built with Processing