I’ve finally been inspired to start digging into arduino and am quickly learning there’s a lot more to physical computing than my phone’s accelerometer. As an Interactive art director I’ve made it a point to learn as much about the code side of things as I have the visual design. It’s not that I’m looking to master every language. I’m grateful to have genius developers for that, but to come up with ground breaking ideas you need to know what your capabilities are. This has helped me a lot in the mobile and flash space, but I’ve been pretty limited beyond that.
Physical computing or interaction design is a great place for interactive designers to stretch their imaginations and take all that data they’ve been pushing around into a new dimension. Arduino is a simple and easy way to start playing with some of those concepts. It’s basically a tiny computer you can connect via usb to send and recieve information from sensors.
The possibilities are endless, but to get your brain going here are some of the sensors and modules you can use to read and display data.
- Photocells – Light sensors that detect how bright it is.
- Thermostats – Temperature check
- Magnetic switch (reed relay) – turns on and off when two magnets come together
- Carpet switch – detects when someone is standing on it
- Range Finder – can use sonar or infrared to tell distance
- Accelerometer – to tell tilt and speed
- Motion sensors- detects movement
- Potentiometer – a dial for adjusting analog input
- LED – lights
- LCD – screen for displaying info and graphics
- Servo motor – like a fan motor or possibly spin a robot wheel
There are a ton more. Check out www.sparkfun.com to buy components like these. Visit http://arduino.cc and http://www.instructables.com to learn more about the programing side.
The image at the top was a project I built from a great starter book called Getting started with Arduino. It uses Processing (another development language) and arduino to read a specified blog. In this instance the Roundarch blog and count the number of times three words appear. I counted the words “flash”, “Roundarch” and “mobile” since I knew they would appear in the text a lot. It then converted those numbers into a hex code to generate a color and lit up the rgb LED to that color. As new blog entries are written the light will change to reflect the updates. Maybe not super practicle, but if your an interactive AD it definitely can get the imagination going.