Interactive art week 16

Don’t forget your stuff!

이명선 2017310640

Lisa van Driest 2019319599

Interactive Art 2019

Sungkyunkwan University

After brainstorming many ideas an issue that we encountered was the fact that when in a rush to leave for important occasions, or when waking up late and having to hurry in the morning it is not uncommon to forget your important belongings, this is a situation that must sound familiar to many people, right? Therefor we came up with a solution. We created an installation using processing and Arduino that helps with this issue.

Our idea ‘Don’t forget your stuff!’ works very easily. In processing the user can select the occasion or day that is applicable for that specific day before packing their bag. When getting ready to leave and packing their bag they scan the items that they put in it and processing checks the list of items that is needed for the specific preset that was selected. If all items are scanned, visual feedback will be provided that the user is good to go, if not all items are scanned the interface will show what items are still missing so that the user knows what to take before leaving.

How does it work? Using an RFID sensor in combination with Arduino and processing we marked multiple ‘important’ items with scannable stickers so that the RFID sensor could read them. We created an interface in processing that had multiple presets that the user might want to use on a daily basis as well as custom presets using multiple classes and arrays. After selecting a preset, the list of important items will appear on the display and each time an important item is scanned a visual feedback will be provided. Below is the video of our final project:

Idea sketch, process and prototype.

Initially our concept was a bit different and we changed some sensors along the way therefor we have multiple different sketches of our idea, these are illustrated below.

In this sketch we still had the idea to use a proximity sensor to check if a person was leaving, instead of giving a visual feedback we wanted to give audio feedback to the user if items were still missing from the preset while they wanted to leave the house.

An even earlier concept that we had was using an LED, a button and LCD screen. When putting items in their bags the user scans them. The RFID sensor will then check all individual items and store them digitally. Once the user is ready to leave, they press the ready button and an LED screen will show if they are not missing any items. But we also changed that Idea, below is the sketch for our initial final concept:

This was the first sketch for the interface:

The images below show the final wireframes: 

The progress

Before ending up with our final project we encountered many issues with coding. The first issue we had was the fact that our RFID sensor wasn’t working, however it turned out that we just had to solder it in order to work. Once we got the RFID sensor to work we made a lot of progress however we then encountered the next issue of not being able to use the Arduino data to work in processing, we didn’t know how to connect the two together so we asked for help. After fixing this issue we continued making the processing visualization and interface but we needed to create buttons which could lead us to another page, for this we asked help again and we eventually made our interface work as well. After some other small bug fixes we eventually managed to get our project working!

Conclusion

What did we learn/What went well?

Over the course of this project we really learned that if you put in your best effort you can do things that you might not think you could do before. This course made us learn so many new things and troughout the semester a big learning curve could be seen for everyone. It was very cool to see how everyone including us was able to work hard to eventually get an actually working end project made completely from scratch. It was incredibly interesting to learn about processing and Arduino and actually immediately use it in projects and assignments, I think this greatly helped in actually learning and understanding the subject.

What could be improved?

For this project specifically struggled with some very specific small issues that often gave impediments, resulting in us not being able to continue for short whiles but we also learned that sometimes there would be other ways to work around certain roadblocks so then we realized that the solution didn’t always have to be found. Another think that could be improved on was most likely the fact that both of us were so busy with all our other school projects that the accumulated time we could work on this project was very scarce compared to the amount of time that would would have wanted to spend on this project. So something that could have been improved is the final project itsself considering that we both had more ideas but weren’t able to excecute everything because of time pressure.