Week 7 - Behaviour Workshop: Arduino Introduction

Today saw us breaking into our focus workshops. In the behaviour workshop we were introduced to the wonderful Arduino kit that will allow us to program the behaviours of the prototype and to represent the intended interface of the product. I am hoping that this will also assist us in analysing the behaviour of the user in relation to the product.

Arduino Board

This first workshop introduced us to the very bare basics of circuitry and programming the board to run a simple circuit. 

Here you can see a very simple circuit followed by the program used to make one LED flash on and off at 1000 millisecond intervals.

The Arduino code is apparently very simple however I have never done any programming before so it might take me a little while to get the logic going to write my own program.

Again... very basic but just adding little bits of code to build on what I am able to do. So this is simply an alternating flashing program.

I'm currently not sure how I am going to be able to get my head around this enough to be able to put it to much use in what seems to be the very short time that we have.

For now I think we need to be working toward what the design freeze in week 9 is going to look like. 

In terms of designing the prototype and it's behaviours I need to collate a list of behaviours and product interface requirements to see what is possible within my prototyping capabilities. I know the types of inputs and outputs that are available to us however there are a number of mechanisms that need to be driven by the Arduino. These mechanisms still require some testing to ensure that they provide the correct behaviours for the user. Once the mechanisms have been tested then the parts and circuitry can be designed to drive them.

This workshop was an interesting introduction however time constraints will prevent me from extensively exploring the possibilities that come with the Arduino kit. The nature of our project is highly physical and tangible so at the moment I am inclined to think that  the complexity of the product and prototype will come in the physical mechanism that will be employed.