Andreea Tecusan

Documenting projects and processes in the 2nd year undergraduate course 'Interactive products' at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Fall 2014.

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6 minutes

6 minutes, alone, outside.

Take the lock with you outside when you need a break. Breathing into it will heat it up and turn on a pulsating light for 6 minutes. Then it turns off, and you go inside again.

The product

The lock is made out of brass and holds three components inside: a humidity sensor that senses your breathing, a peltier that generates the heat that the brass then conducts over the whole lock, and an LED.

I've used an Arduino Uno board to control the behavior of the lock over time. The code tells it to turn on when a certain amount of humidity is detected, then it turns on the LED that fades up and down, and it turns on the peltier. Over 12 half-minutes I have set what power the peltier should be on, starting at full power for 2 minutes, than fading it down as the metal gets warm. After 6 minutes everything is turned off. 

Background

I wanted to make an experience that I fondly remember from when I used to smoke: those 6-minute breaks you take all by yourself, especially in the wintertime. Just you and the cigarette, and preferably silence. Just the sound of tobacco sizzling and maybe a bird or the wind.

Non-smokers usually don't take breaks to just go outside and stay there, so I thought that having something with you that tells you when time has passed, without being a watch or an iPhone, would be nice. After studying objects that felt good to hold and fickle with, I found that the shape of a lock was quite satisfying. It's solid, has a weight to it, and a loop that you can play around with without thinking to much about it. 

Made by: Andreea Tecusan, design student at AHO (Oslo School of Architecture and Design)

Music: Ol' Burger Beats, Susanne Sundfør and Store P

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LAST DAY - ASSEMBLING DAY

So yesterday was the last day of working on our projects. I spent some of the day finishing the code (with good help from my uncle on Skype), and figuring out how to cool my mosfet and other vital things - so now the most important part of my project works :D and the rest I spent putting everything together and getting ready for the exhibition today. It's been intensive, but fun!

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FILMING DAY! Me and my very helpful friend Kristin filmed today at my place. I was so lucky with the weather - beautiful light this cold December day. 

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Pictures from the making of my object. Had a lot of fun doing this, and so cool to see it all fit perfectly in the end.

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Spent the evening in the workshop working on my physical object. I milled brass by hand and got someone to film it with hyperlapse.

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INPUT: Humidity/Breathing

So at the eleventh hour I figured out and tested what the input is going to be on my object: humidity through breathing. The humidity sensor works really well, after breathing on it 2, 3 times with warm breath it peaks at 99,9% humidity. So I'm using this in my code and in my object to activate the object (the LED starts pulsating and the Peltier gets warms for 6 minutes).

I think that it will be a nice interaction, heating up the object in your hands with your own breath. It's an instinctive thing to do anyway when it's cold outside and you're trying to warm your hands.

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A video of my experience prototype: the LED pulsating (using a yellow one here, it's not as bright as the one I'm going to use in the final prototype) and the brass area getting hot (which you sadly can't see).

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This week has been a bit of a struggle, both with the coding and the physical object. I've been trying to find the best form for the object, keeping in mind all the stuff I have to put in it. I've decided to go for a lock-form. It has a big loop that you can play around with, and it makes it easy to take with you and hold it in you hand. And the lock is a nice metaphor;  you go outside to unlock and be "free". 

The coding is tricky because I have to find a way to randomize the power of the heat and light over time. I want it to be random because then you won't think about it. If it's a steady rhythm with regular peaks you might keep track of time more. And I still have the problem of my mosfet getting hot, been trying to get help on the Arduino forum online. 

I haven't decided yet how to actually START the thing, I'm thinking of blowing on it or lighting it with a lighter. Something that makes sense to do to heat up something.

I made a little prototype with an area of brass that you can touch to feel the heat and the little LED pulsates next to it. It's the thing on the picture with wires coming out of it.

On the first picture you also see a chunk of brass, several sensors, a DFRduino pro mini (kinda like the Arduino pro mini), and a heating element. Going to try to replace the peltier with that in order to avoid getting a cold side (the peltier gets warm on one side and cold on the other).

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Here I am, testing the components outside and trying to imagine the experience :) And then a picture of an improvised "heatsink" for my overheated MOSFET transistor. I'll have to make a new and bigger one though. 

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Today we had a run-through of our project in groups, really cool to see everyones stuff :) And good to share common frustration around  components that overheat, for example. 

I took my stuff outside to test the experience, and it works well. It feels good to touch something warm when it's cold outside and the pulsating LED is also quite nice in the dark. But I noticed that the peltier doesn't get as hot as when I tested it inside, so I have to give it more power. 

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Dimming an LED - check! So now my code both dims/fades the heat and the light, just have to find the right rhythm for both. 

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Progress!

Yay, so today I made some progress with my coding after good guidance from our teacher Einar. The reason (at least one reason) I couldn't get a piece of code working yesterday was that I forgot to change from digital to analog.

My code is based on the "blink without delay" code, which is intended for an LED, which is digital. The Peltier is analog, so changing from HIGH/LOW (1/0) to 255 and 0 fixed it. So now I can fade my Peltier up to a certain heat using a counter, and doing this slowly thanks to the blinking code. it turns it on and off so fast that the heating process takes longer time. 

Now I have to find out how the heating element and the LED should behave over the 6 minute time span. Here are some examples:

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Coding

I really wanted to get up and running the technical part of my project today, but failed.

Quick recap: I'm making an object you can take with you outside when you need a break, but don't smoke. It's something you can fiddle with for 6 minutes, something calming and non-demanding. It then lets you know in a subtle and pleasant way that 6 minutes has passed. I'm using heat and a small light as outputs/indicators.

SO, I've tried to control a peltier (thermoelectric cooler, using this as a heating element for now) for hours . I know I have to use millis to set the time, and find some sort of level on the heating element that is comfortable to hold in your hand for 6 minutes. I think using millis as a timer is the way to go. 

I thought first of dimming the heat up for 3 minutes, and then dim it down again, but I think a constant comfortable heat is better for the experience, and that I'll have an LED pulsating and indicating the time passing rather than the heat. And at the end both the heat and light go out. Time to go inside. 

Here are some snaps of todays effort, even if I don't have it all together yet. 

Setting up a Pelter to test how to control it with code.

Many attempts at writing code for the Peltier.

Alternative table setting today in class, we call this 'the birds foot'.

Today's sunrise at my 6 minutes morning session on my balcony.

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Searching, testing, drawing

Ok, so this gif might not tell you anything, but I was testing fiddling with a ring during my 6 minutes outside this morning with my coffee. I figured out that the thing I'm making should be used by one hand only, so the other one is free for holding a cup of coffee. And the possibility of motion is good, so it's not just something you hold in your hand, but something you can fiddle with, without looking at it. 

I've been looking at stuff you can do with one hand only, and got lost in the 'party-tricks' genre on youtube.. totally burned my fingers trying to light a match with one hand, and almost fainted trying to whistle through my fingers. But the point is that there are many things we do with just one hand and the possibilities are endless.

I drew up a little sequence of a guy working late and going out for a smoke, and then a sequence of him doing the same but taking with him this object that accompanies his break and lets him know when 6 minutes have passed. It sets the mood for the context I'm envisioning for the movie I'll make for the final product.

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The past few days I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to make for this last project. I started out focusing on components and what they can do. I came up with lots of cool stuff that do cool things, like a box you can hammer away on and light rays will show the impact.

But none of the ideas had a real context or purpose. So I stopped and though about settings in life, moments and experiences that are interesting. Reading the brief we got, I especially noticed this line: "Your products don’t have to be useful or spectacular, but could also be about refining delightful or beautiful interactions".

So imagine this: You're working late at school or at your studio or whatever, and you feel it's time to take a break. If you're a smoker, you put your coat on, go outside, light the cigarette, inhale and listen to the sizzle from the tobacco burning. It's probably chilly outside and quiet, and you have 6 minutes all to yourself. You don't check your iPhone, because having a smoke and looking at the sky is enough. Then you go inside and continue your work. 

What if I could make something that gives you the same experience - a non-social, quiet break outside with something to fiddle with while you're out there. Something calming. Because the truth is that non-smokers don't go outside to just stand there for 6 minutes, but they should!

This object should be small, something you have with you all the time, and it should have a subtle interactiveness. Maybe you blow on it, because it's cold outside, and it becomes warm and cools off after 6 minuets. Maybe you tap it three times and a little light goes on and slowly dims down during the 6 minutes. 

Today I tested going out for 6 minutes with some random stuff i found, and my friend Gard did the same. We both had thoughts on what worked and not. I've also talked to a lot of people about rituals, stones, quiet moments and those 6 minutes. So now comes the fun part of figuring out what this object will look like and behave. 

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FINAL PROJECT

Our final brief in this course is to invent an interactive product using everything we've learned this semester. We can only use one input and one output, but otherwise the brief is open. So it's both exiting that we get to do whatever we want, but also very difficult to choose.

Today we've been sketching, discussing and playing around with ideas. We've had a workshop using the 'forced relations" method; pairing one random input and one output together and making concepts around that. Here are some of my sketches and thoughts from today.

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Thermoelectric cooler

Today our task was to focus on one component, get to know it, test it and demonstrate it. Frida and I chose a thermoelectric cooler (TEC/peltier cell). This is a component that creates a temperature difference between its two sides. One side gets warm and one side gets cold. You can use it to heat or cool something, or generate electric power. The greater the difference between cold and heat, the greater the power.

Features:

40 x 40 x 3.6mm lmax - 7A Umax - 15.4V Qcmax - 62.2W Tmax - 69C 1.7 Ohm resistance 127 thermocouples Max Operating Temp: 180°C Min Operating Temp: -50°C

Experiment: using fire to light up an LED

We tried to use a peltier to generate electricity to an LED by using fire. We took a lighter and heated up one side of the peltier and held it to a cold metal by the window. The multimeter showed that power was being produced, but when we hooked up the LED it wasn't enough to make it light up. We figured out that we needed a Joule Thief, which stores up electricity and shoots it out. We didn't have the components to make if, but this video shows how it works:

With the Joule thief, we could in theory have made a wallpaper/installation of a burning tree, like this for example :)

Using a Peltier with Arduino:

First we checked that the peltier still worked by hooking it up to a 12V battery, and indeed, it worked. So much in fact that it hurt to touch the peltier. On both the hot and cold side.

Then, we used this tutorial to hook up a Peltier to the Arduino. Here's the circuit:

The point of this is to use the Arduino to control the amount of heat/cold the peltier gives. You use the serial monitor to press either "a" or "z" to make it warmer or colder. The MOSFET controls the amount of power coming from the 12V battery.

Here's what the code looks like:

Here's what's happening in the serial port when you insert "z" three times (power goes down):

sources: www.sparkfun.com , www.garagelab.com