Studio Session

Finally, we made it to week 13 of this semester. I can't believe this is officially the last class of my master's study. I really enjoy the last report back session not only I get the chance to hear everyone's working progress, more importantly, but it's also nice to see everyone's doing well at the beginning of June.

Report back questions:

Q0: A lot of restrictions were lifted 1 June, what are you most looking forward to doing?

I don’t think I have more leisure time at the moment and until this, I finished all the assignments. But I'm looking forward to go back to Brisbane at the end of this month to meep up with my friends because we are going to graduate this semester.

Q1: One sentence recap of concept.

The Earth Globe - an interactive globe aim to help children develop good habits for the care of the environment and arise their awareness of sustainability, especially focusing on garbage recycling.

Q2: If you had a magic wand and could wave it over your project, what would you want it to do? (Be specific here, I know you all want it to be “finished” - what is that ONE thing that you really want it to be able to do?).

For my own project, I really want to make the smell function come true and present it to the visitor on a real exhibition so that they can smell it in person. That will definitely make the globe to be more interactive and also gave the user a better immersive experience.

→ I got the suggestion to use something similar to a perfume spray or a mini watering can with fragment liquid in it. Then a motor could be used to trigger the container to release the fragment mist into the air. (Or it can be done manually by adding the fragment by the operator.)

Q3: What is your burning question right now? (Doesn’t have to be project related, could be more broadly related to the course, uni, life & the universe).

For burning question for me is to finish all the assignments and thesis in the next 3 weeks. That would be really challenging for me. But since this is the last semester in my student life journey, I will try my best to have a good ending of it.

Final product building progress

Based on the feedback from both team appraisal and individual user testing, several changes have been made for the final product. First of all, not new function including the Smell function has mentioned above has been added to the globe due to the technical constraint. But the whole circuit system has been optimised and adjusted since it wasn't really stable before when shooting the demo video.

For the first output of Sight, the LED lights in the globe have been rearranged to try to match the different places on the map. To be more specific, I tried to put eight lights more close to the surface to they would be representative of the major big city in Australia. However, it didn't work as expected. The LED lights keep moving while the position changing. But in general, the LED lights order and colour changing pattern have been finally decided and finished the code part.

The Hearing function was keep the original design for the demo prototype. The suggestion form the feedback is to use a DFPlayer Mini MP3 Player to play a better quality of melody so that the user could understand the meaning of the music notice better. Indeed the Piezo buzzer could make only a simple melody, it did cause a little confusion for one user during the evaluation. But it did meet the success criteria and did not affect that much during the evaluation. So the only thing I need to fix is the problem of two parts of the melody code accidental connected together in the last line. After checked a few times of the code, I found there's an error that occurs at the end of the positive melody for the positive garbage point reading process.

The Touch output has been made some changes at the stage. The vibration effect wasn't obvious during the prototype evaluation. Mainly because of the position changing of the by the servo motor is causing the shaking effect as well. That's why the vibration making by the motor has been covered by the servo motor. Here I make the decision to remove the vibrate function and the code from the final product. The other issue I fixed is the unstable shaking effect caused by the rubber bands are not elastic enough. In the last week's workshop session, I got the advice from Clay to replace a bigger servo motor if the shaking is still happening. But luckily this week the issue has been solved after I replace it with a more elastic rubber band.

At this stage, the remaining issues have all been tackled and found the solution to respond to users' feedback. The rest of the work is to prepare the text and visual material for the portfolio website.

Annotated portfolio building progress

The text content and the media material have been generated in the process during this week. However, it has been working a bit slower than I planned since I've got my thesis demo presentation and web poster to submit in this week as well. It was quite a tight schedule for me this week. ut anyway, there will be only three days left for me to complete all the tasks and get ready to present my final product for the visitor online.