This week, Anh, Guang and I began working on our Media Controller project, which was originally to create a glove with FSRs and with flex sensors sewn in that can send serial signals to a PC and play sound samples. So I tweaked this week’s lab assignment to graph the degree that a flex sensor is bent.
After several meetings, we weren’t all in agreement with the direction of our project and I admit I was getting very frustrated. But we always agreed on one thing: food. We’d end up some how or another having lunch. And during one of these hungry moments, we all decided that food would be an amazing medium to control for our project.
Our brainstorming session, whittled down, ended up with the following conclusions: 1) Asian food is best served hot; Really hot. 2) Really hot food can end up burning people’s tongues. 3) If someone were to invent some way to attach a fan to utensils or bowls so it can cool down soup or noodles, we probably would never use it. But we want to make one anyway.
Aesthetically we all enjoy the sound and feel of servo motors. They’re like the little engine that could. And as we agreed that this isn’t necessarily a viable product but rather within the tradition of Chindogu, the Japanese art of creating useless inventions, we attached a paper fan to a servo, borrowed a temperature sensor from Avery and programmed it to move back and forth when the temp sensor’s output is over 98 degrees fahrenheit. That way our media controller will have a selling point: “Blows on your food, not on your face.”
There’s a lot of work to be done, and more meals to be shared before this project will be ready. But I’m actually pretty excited about it.
