Taking Membrane Switches to Scale: First Steps
Recently my lab mate and I were fantasizing about theoryland. It’s this magical place where you go up to a whiteboard and, using your extensive domain knowledge, allow ephemeral non-toxic marker to create your dream system. But no Expo could…
Prototyping Membrane Switches
Membrane switches are very simple. Physically, there are no “fancy” materials involved. It’s easy to see why they have been on our microwaves allowing us to accidentally burn PopSecret for many years and counting. With only the following materials I was…
Capacitive Touch Sensors in a Grid
It is also possible to take the idea discussed in Why Keyboards Matter post and tailor it for capacitive touch. This way it also possible to represent 900 individual user inputs with far less microcontroller pins. The main idea behind this…
Why Keyboards Matter
Making a matrix with 9 inputs isn’t all that bad. I wouldn’t mind wiring each one up. But when we get two orders of magnitude bigger to 900, we want something more cleverly constructed, reducing duplicity and manual labor. While…
Prototyping Capacitive Sensors
Previous blog posts explored capacitive sensing and proposed it as ideal for our digital Peabody quilt. However, unlike a smartphone or tablet, we have a very interesting design problem: how can we embody the quilt form and feel such that…
Peabody Overall Report
Peabody project involves making a physical version of Peabody’ alternative timeline representation. The main components will include 30 NeoPixel strips, Arduino Mega microcontroller, and some kind of touch sensors. The project can be subdivided into four parts: crafting the actual…
Materials (touch sensing)
The interactions with the Peabody quilt are touch based – the user presses on a square and the LED lights up. Thus, parts of the quilt must be sensitive to touch. There are two potential ways to include touch sensitivity in…
Lighting up the NeoPixels
There is extensive documentation on NeoPixels, including a very handy “überguide”. It is written assuming experience with Arduino/electronics. I would recommend following this, and using this post for clarifications. While I’ve had a reasonable amount of experience, I would still…
Materials (hardware)
List of Materials: Female DC Power adapter – 2.1mm jack to screw terminal block – Qty: 2, Price: $4 Tighten the screws to hold the capacitor and power/ground wires in place Adafruit NeoPixel Digital RGB LED Strip – White 30 LED…
Designing on a Budget
When purchasing materials for the Peabody visualization quilt, we discovered that LEDs are expensive, and budget might be a limiting factor. Subsequently, we constructed our quilt’s physical design around this constraint. To light up our quilt, we purchased strips of digitally-addressable…
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