Contact - Report Back

this week, we still have a report back session in our contact class. What we need to report is what we did during the mid-break holiday. As for me, my concept is to make an interactive coding game with Arduino and react. My idea is to connect the browser and Arduino, the game interface will appear on the browser and there is a coding Ide on the left of the screen with some coding instructions, and on the right of the screen is a game window, and you need to use code to control the character. The motor of Arduino will be connected to the computer. I will use the motor to control the movement of a card character. When each time you pass through a level in the browser, the Arduino paper character will move forward.

The picture below is the plan of my individual project:

Now I have completed the first milestone, so during the mid-break, I have did some research on the arduino and figure out how to connect the arduino with web browser. The way I followed to connect these two things is a nodejs library called socket.io and I can now control the motor by clicking the buttons on the browser.

After the report back I got some feedback from tutors, Clay thought my concept is not physical enough, because I just use the arduino as a feedback of the game, the main interaction is inside of the screen. So I have to change another ideas.

Thursday Workshop

This week's workshop is used to Q&A, we can ask any questions about our project and we can get some useful answers from Ben and Steven. Because I have to change another physical interaction in my project, so I just asked steven for any suggestions. Steven mentioned an interesting idea called 'punch card', which is a way to enter information physically, people can insert a small card with holes into the card reader, the card reader can recognize the content of the card and enter it into the computer. The 'punch card' video is shown below.

I tried to make a punch card reader with paper and some paper clips.

Although the recognition is a bit insensitive, the data can be read.