Dance Your Cares Away Group 1
Dance Your Cares Away:
Our brief is to create an “E-Textile” (t-shirt, bag, skirt, etc) with interactive LED’s that can be set to either flash to the beats of the music or the movement of the wearer. For our group, our main focus is finding a way to make this product stand out and function in a way where movement can change or alter the main output, and an additional output.
Meeting, November 18th
Deciding a topic: We met to discuss our favored projects and which ones (our top three) we would send forward to our lecturers. We are mainly interested in the projects that involved some sort of interactivity as an input, with LED’s as an output.
Meeting, November 24th
Creating a brief and a design framework for our project: Now that we have been given our topic, we discussed the brief itself and what criteria our group would use to make our project unique, creative and apply design theory that we learned from lectures. Additionally, we looked at sample code and other Arduino projects that use LED strips as an output. Below is the framework we came up with:
Objective:
The aim of our product, will be that it responds to movement or music in a form in the context of exercising or recreational/professional dance. This will be done through testing of components and will be created in Arduino with functions that connect the inputs and outputs to make an enjoyable, interactive experience for the user. The main function of this will be for either safety, precaution or tracking information for an athlete, or a audiovisual display on a wearable garment.
Purpose:
To entertain and/or inform the user of their movements by creating a series of responsive light patterns which will indicate the movement of the wearer. It will respond not just to generic movements, but movements in extremities (hands or feet), as this is an aspect of responsive textiles that has not been explored as much.
Target Audience:
As a group, we all agreed that a textile that involves movement and recreational dancing would appeal to a younger demographic, for example, festival goers, concert goers and people who go to music events. This is also because of perceived affordances as we think that a younger demographic (between 16-30) would be able to adapt to the user experience and interface of the product, as they would be comfo
rtable operating their smartphones, tablets, etc.
Market research and comparable products/Projects:
Since this was a primary task in the brief we were given, we took consideration to other products on the market, such as the sound-sensitive LED patch t-shirt often sold at festivals, and some newer innovations, such as movement sensitive sports shirts for runners or cyclists to measure heart rate and speed. This idea is derived from the growth of popularity of products such as “FitBits” and other small compact wearable technologies that aim to help people track their progress with walking, running, and a variety of other sports.
Meeting, November 28th
In this meeting, we corroborated all our individual brainstorms to come up with ideas for the uses and functionalities for our chosen topic, “Dance your cares away”. This was the topic we were most interested in as it provides a bigger design scope in terms of creativity, as there is a large range of outputs and inputs that we could use. We made a brainstorm as a group looking at possible devices and what we could use. A success was that we were successful in coming with a range of options for our project, but one thing that we as a group could have improved upon was narrowing down the options for components we required as this did not further our progress as much as it could have.
Below is the brainstorm and notes from the meeting:
Meeting, 30th November
Today, we finalized what specific components were going to fit into our design. We listed the components we were going to need for this process and wrote up a task list for the entire project detailing what tasks need to be completed for each part of the submission.
Idea Process:
- Brainstorm
- Individually coming up with ideas
- Investigating our ideas and doing market research
- Putting our ideas together and shortlisting the ones that fit our brief
- Outlining a brief
- Storyboard
Project organisation and time management:
- Splitting up tasks between group members evenly and accordingly to strengths and weaknesses
- Scheduling meetings until the deadline to discuss and further our project
- Create Gantt chart and task list
Development:
- Make testing prototype of initial components
- Breadboard layout and materials needed for the project
- Purchase and do testing on components with a lo-fi prototype of the basic functionality of this project
- What were the failures and successes of the testing?
- Write a pseudo code for the program to help visualize methods needed for the project
- Writing the actual code needed to connect the components
- Debug and test
- Present project
Submission tasks:
- Design blog
- Pictures/videos
- Brainstorms
- Timelines
- Maker manual
- Summary and basic purpose
- Tools, materials and components needed
- Breadboard and layout diagram
- Method for building it
- Code required and side comments explaining what each part does
- List of pros and cons for the project and a short discussion on further extension of the project
- Presentation slides
- Project idea
- Developmental stage
- Design principles and choices made
- Aims and purpose
- Successes and failures
Meeting, December 3rd
Low-fi prototype:
We decided on Force Sensitive Resistors, Flex sensors, Touch Potentiometers as an input, LED lights as an output, and a shoe as the wearable element of the project. After ordering components, we first received the Force Sensitive Resistors. These are analogue components, meaning there is a much higher range of values that it can interpret (and then artificially be passed through to Arduino as a digital value), which calculate the amount of force exerted by objects, or in this case, parts of your body. After researching the FSR and the sample code, we put together a circuit that would change the color of an RGB LED light when different amounts of force were used (using it between index finger and thumb), where it would turn blue if a large amount of pressure was used, green if less pressure was used, and if no pressure was used, then it would turn red. We thought this was a good start for our functional prototype as it had the basic function of adjusting color depending on the force used using just one LED light. This way, if we knew that we could alter patterns or brightness of one LED, it would be possible to implement this on a strip of LED lights.
Meeting December 6th
Fortunately, we have been able to borrow an LED strip from another group to test our code. We were able to incorporate the potentiometer into the design. We have experimented with sample code with the potentiometer to see how it can control the intensity, i.e. the voltage that passes through it. After trying several methods and soldering some components together, we were able to make the potentiometer and the force sensitive resistor functional in the circuit. Below is a video of this being tested. One issue that we faced was connecting an external power supply to our circuit, which then consequently resulted in our potentiometer burning slightly.
Meeting December 12th
Unfortunately, the LED strip that we ordered did not come in time and we resorted to borrowing another LED strip from a lab technician at EECS. This is due to the fact that the LED strip we ordered was supposed to arrive on the Monday, meaning we would have had enough time to incorporate it into the circuit and testing and been able to design an attractive and appealing product. Instead, on Monday, we received a broken LED that was unreadable by the arduino IDE. This was acknowledged by the technician on Thursday. Between these two days we used the borrowed LED strip just to ensure our code and circuit were working, which they were.
The positive aspect is that we were able to incorporate all the functionalities we wanted, however we aren’t allowed to alter it in any way as it is not ours, so we could not permanently attach the LED strip to the shoe as we had originally intended.
Below is a video of the flex sensor being bent and the LED brightness reacting to the sensor:
We were able to map the angle of flex read in from the sensor to the brightness constraints of the sensor.
Gantt chart and list of tasks to be completed by each member of the team:
Lastly, below is a link to a PDF of how to create the spacebelt at home, including steps, a circuit and breadboard layout diagram, and further developments.
