blog.StevenMHernandez

Making crazy stuff with electronics, programming and graphic design.

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Recently built a pet robot which connects to AWS IoT to wirelessly update the eink display through WiFi.

https://github.com/StevenMHernandez/pet-bot

I’ll have to get a video of the device working soon

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Interesting situation here. The animations are stored on an SD card as files (for example: 1.img, 2.img 3.img etc). Then after the images, there is a `message.txt` file which contains a message that should be printed onto the screen. The glitchyness in this video is caused by the `message.txt` file being rendered onto the screens as if they were images themselves.

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Touching the cactus’s spikes on either side switches from animation mode to text scrolling mode. For some reason though, no text was showing up at this point yet.

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Final clay cactus ready for the fire (or oven in this case)

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Working on the clay form for the electronic cactus. The dowel rods are to keep holes for the eyes as well as the capacitive touch spikes.

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Whenever someone touches the `capacitive touch` sensors, the screens update to reveal either an animation or some text (both loaded into the Teensy 3.5 from the attached sd card.

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I was also able to get a quick globe animation running.

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After fixing the issues with the extra data, I was able to get a `yes` success message printing from the SD card onto the screens

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I had been hard at work, building the guts of my recent electronic clay cactus project. I built a web page that would allow me to draw images which would then be encoded into data that could be drawn onto these screens.

I soon realized after drawing several `scenes` worth of images, that I was encoding the images all incorrectly. There was extra data being added to the files somewhat randomly which offset the frames into the mess you see here.

Below the screens, you can see the Teensy 3.5 I was using as the `brains` of this project. It was a bit trickier to get the Teensy 3.5 to work for me than the 3.2 I used last year in my Electronic Eyes project.

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A Little Electronic Clay Cactus.

Built with an Arduino; this electronic clay cactus begins displaying animations and text after having its spikes touched.

Here, the cactus displays a sun and moon animation within its eyes.

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Here, I am shown playing with using an arduino to interact as a composite output to a television screen. All at an amazing 112 by 96 pixels.

The two potentiometers control the x-speed and the y-speed respectively.

The code can be found on my Github.

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Another example of the early development of the interactive glitch wall.

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Screenshot early in the process of developing the interactive glitch wall.

At this point in development, the colors did not fade out; unlike other glitch wall development examples I have posted here. Instead colors remained present until they were `erased` with by moving other objects and colors in front of the camera.

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Here’s a better, higher quality example of what the interactive glitch wall actually did.

This screen capture was recorded while the piece was still in development.

At this point, the majority of the application was built (the visual aspect), but it had not yet been converted to run on the raspberry pi nor did it save gifs or upload the gifs online.

The blue/green color present in this version was dropped for the final installation. Instead there was no noticeable hue change; which allowed from great pops of bright color as seen: here and here.

[stevenmhernandez]

I’ve found some interesting video/images of past works on my computer recently.

This video demonstrates some sketch I wrote when I first began working with arduinos a year or so ago. The sketch simply toggled through leds and changed the rate that the led blinks.

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The (in development stage) innards of the electronic face project. The final electronic face used a Teensy 3.1 as the microcontroller brain; as seen in this image. Also, the wires had not all been solder at the time of this shot.

more info on the electronic face project: http://stevenhdesigns.com/project/electric-face

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Close up of the custom circuit board I designed for the electronic face project. The board tells the arduino within the electronic face the actions to display on the face’s eyes.

more info on the electronic face project: http://stevenhdesigns.com/project/electric-face