Is an almost useless machine maybe useful after all?
For this week's seminar, we set the goal to use some of the motors, sensors and buttons scavenged from the disassembling of various consumer electronic products last week and build scrappy, low tech machines that were ever so close to being useless – but not quite. Our team settled on the concept of wanting to invoke the feeling of being offended in our users, which turned out to be a surprisingly difficult feeling to provoke. After some thinking, we decided that we would want to build a little robot, consisting of a motor, infrared sensors and a mirror. When a user comes close to view herself or himself in the mirror, the IR sensors detect the approach and the motor turns the mirror away from the user. All of the parts mentioned were sourced from the disassembling of the Roomba cleaning robot, while the mirror was the HDD disk from an old Apple iMac that was taken apart.
Through clever design of the robot's head we managed to arrange both mirrors and sensors to give the robot an almost human appearance. Users were surprisingly quick to attribute human qualities to the machine, with comments ranging from "He's so cute" to "I can relate to it, I'm like that too". Below, some impressions from this week can be found, as well as a short video presenting the final result once we finish cutting it.
Proudly presenting out video documentation:
Programming flowchart, Arduino code and serial monitor (left), assembling the robot for the first time (right).
Schematics of our little robot, skillfully visualized by Ruben.
From top left to bottom right: Planning the video shoot as a storyboard, shooting the video and cutting it.