Conductive Liquid

Elie Zananiri and I decided to make a fluid that would allow us to create liquid circuits. We tried many different combinations of the materials: water, oil, salt, powder graphite, and glue. The best combination was water, salt, and graphite, which resulted in a mixture that gave a steady reading of about 100 ohms. We used the liquid to create both a drawn circuit and an irrigation circuit.

Conductive Fluid Drawing from Matt Richard on Vimeo.

Conductive fluid irrigation LED circuit from Matt Richard on Vimeo.

144 LED Color Tile Sketches

Recently I have been playing with a light that is made up of a 12x12 grid of RGB LEDs. I made a 5 minute video of most of the sketches I made in the last three days.



LED Color Tile Sketches from Matt Richard on Vimeo.

Physical Computing Week 2 Homework

For week two I had to use a sensor(analog in) to send information to the Arduino that then used the data to regulate something else. In my case I used 3 potentiometers that controlled blue, green and red LEDs.

I wanted to create a way to make many different colors. I put the LEDs inside of a cube of foamcore with a paper window. Watch the videos to see how it went.


With the lights on so you can see the components.


Color Maker in the light from Matt Richard on Vimeo.


With the lights off so you can see it work.


Color Maker in the dark from Matt Richard on Vimeo.

Fixing Physical Computing Homework

Thanks Kevin it seems to work :)

My brother Kevin, who lives in Florida and works as a Flash developer, had an idea about how to fix my code. He sent me a snippet of the void loop() section and I swapped it in and then rearranged the variables.

His idea was to check the switchState on every iteration of the for loop. Since switchState would only return 0 or 1(no or yes), he added the value of switchState to the lower of the two LED pins(pin 3) which were in pins 3 and 4.

Code snippet:
void loop() {
for (int i=10; i >= 1; i--){
// read the switch input at the beginning of
// each loop iteration
switchState = digitalRead(switchPin);
digitalWrite((ledPin + switchState), HIGH);
delay(i*(i*10));
digitalWrite((ledPin + switchState), LOW);
delay(i*(i*10));
}

Here is a video:


Physical Computing Week 1 Homework FIXED from Matt Richard on Vimeo.

Physical Computing Week 1 Homework

I finally got my Arduino Diecimila to work on my computer. I was really excited about programming in Arduino. It seemed like such a simple language that I just wanted to dive in and play around a bit.

I played with for loops allowing the LEDs to blink at either an exponentially increasing or decreasing amount. The LED that turns on depends on the position of a switch, whether it is open or closed. Here is my code:

// declare variables:
int switchPin = 2; // digital input pin for a switch
int yellowLedPin = 3; // digital output pin for an LED
int redLedPin = 4; // digital output pin for an LED
int switchState = 0; // the state of the switch

void setup() {
pinMode(switchPin, INPUT); // set the switch pin to be an input
pinMode(yellowLedPin, OUTPUT); // set the yellow LED pin to be an output
pinMode(redLedPin, OUTPUT); // set the red LED pin to be an output
}

void loop() {
switchState = digitalRead(switchPin); // read the switch input:

if (switchState == 1) // if the switch is closed:
for (int i=10; i >= 1; i--){
digitalWrite(yellowLedPin, HIGH); // turn on the yellow LED
delay(i*(i*10));
digitalWrite(yellowLedPin, LOW); // turn off the yellow LED
delay(i*(i*10));
}
digitalWrite(redLedPin, LOW); // turn off the red LED
}
else if (switchState == 0){ // if the switch is open:
for (int i=1; i <= 10; i++){
digitalWrite(redLedPin, HIGH); // turn on the red LED
delay(i*(i*10));
digitalWrite(redLedPin, LOW); // turn off the red LED
delay(i*(i*10));
}
digitalWrite(yellowLedPin, LOW); // turn off the yellow LED
}
}
Here is a video:


The LEDs blinked the way I wanted them to, but the switch wouldn't change the lit LED until after the currently lit one was finished its for loop. I tried adding an if statement with a break to get the for loop to stop, but it didn't work.