microcontroller basics
more switches
setting up your environment
digital input/output
solder party
Homework
✔️Read Ch 1 and the prologue of the Design of Everyday Things (distributed via Slack)
✔️Read Ch 1 and the prologue of Emotional Design (distributed via Slack)
✔️Observation assignment : Observe someone other than yourself using an interface in public. Document what you believe they are trying to accomplish, what steps they must take to reach their goal, and what sort of barriers they encounter. On the blog, post your observations and reflect on how the information from the readings may have helped streamline this interaction. What were the affordances, and what were the signifiers? Tag these posts with the category ‘observation’
✔️Continue to work with your microcontrollers and switches. Build an interface for your microcontroller that uses the switch you built from the previous week. What about your switch makes it easy, what makes it hard? How can you contextualize this interaction? Make a comment on your original post about how you did, or did not get the switch to work with your microcontroller.
Last Friday, I was observing a student trying to compose sound effect by using serge synthesizer and oscilloscope in IDM audio lab. Serge synthesizer is an analogue module synthesizer and oscilloscope is a laboratory instrument used to display and analyze the waveform of electronic signal. In order to create sound effect, the student has to connect the audio signal and control voltage jack via banana cables. At the beginning, he started with plugging in banana cables to the speaker output. After making some basic sound effect, he started to add more cables and adjust other cables in order to create more variables and achieving the ideal sound. The intriguing part is that there are six different colors for the cables, and each color has a specific length. During the observing process, despite the time he used for listening the sound and wondering about how to adjust it, most of the time he is switching the cable to the one with the suitable length and finding where to plug in. Nonetheless, I noticed that sockets on the synthesizer has four different color, each color for a different function. The red one is for control, purple for sync, etc. This efficiently shorten the student’s time for finding which is the appropriate socket to plug in. After all, this machine seems complicated to me, but actually it possesses a special module arrangement and color differentiation to simplify it’s interface.