My thesis is to create a system that makes connecting the electronics I own—homemade or bought—extremely easy and provides for their remote control and data reporting with a consistent and user-friendly interface.
Many of the projects I’ve built have given someone at one location control over or information about a device at another location. Each time I established such a connection, I developed a new communcations protocol and built a new pathway between the two items. This approach works, but it takes time, and it doesn’t capitalize on the potential for networking these items. I would prefer to be able to connect a project to the internet and have it automatically connected to a network all the way up the application layer.
In creating such a system, my first goal is to my life easier, but I also want to make a system that others could use. In designing a user-friendly interface for the system, I hope to open the home automation to a wider audience than exists for current systems. In the future, I see mass-production of the hardware employed as a very real possibility.
So that’s the goal: a user-friendly way to control electronics.
If you’re visiting this site and you notice that the internal links don’t all work and the styling is sometimes inconsistent, you’re right. I’ve just gotten back to working on site migration, and it’s going to get better in the next few days. No really, this isn’t just one of those empty promises you see everywhere on the internet—I am going to work on it. I’d suggest that you leave a comment, but I think that only the spam bots have got that working. Sorry!
Also, if you’re coming here from another page that linked to one of my pre-migration posts, those links are almost repaired. The content is on here somewhere, and since there are fewer than two dozen posts total on this blog, whatever you’re looking for shouldn’t be too hard to find in the meantime.
If you’re seeing this page, then I’m still in the process of moving my blog from Wordpress to Expression Engine. I haven’t done a lot with EE yet, but so far I’ve been impressed. When I want to change this page to a newly minted and separately styled one, I can do so with the click of a button.
The title just about sums it up. On December 1, when Expressions Engine 2.0 comes out, I'll be changing over from Wordpress. I'm ready to do a little bit more with the design of the site, and Jason Santa Maria's use of Expressions Engine has me convinced that it will work well for multiple styles on the same site.
126 Games. Up means Harvard victory. Down means Yale victory.
The importance of this image is that the 126-year history of the Harvard-Yale game (actually slightly longer since the game wasn't played every year) can be told with an image roughly the size of a word.
Another version:
Proposal for a vending machine at ITP:
The goal of the project was originally to add new interaction to a vending machine by creating a rudimentary personality for the machine. Games, special deals, and whimsy could all be added to the electronic interface, bringing users to the machine for entertainment in addition to just the quickest snack available.
Networking the machine would let users provide input into what items they would like to see in a vending machine as well as letting the operator know when the machine needed a refill.
It is also clear that ITP students would want more out of a vending machine than just candy–electronics and physical computing supplies would be provided as necessary.
Finally, the project could provide a gallery and market for small student projects, somewhat like a mini-Etsy. This would make the machine not just a useful device for ITP students, but also an interesting gallery for visitors to the floor.
This applet displays circles of the same hue with randomly generated brightness and saturation.
The first flower in the left photo and the first flower in the right photo are identical.
I can't wait until my orchid blooms again.
For my final project for Understanding Networks, I want to expand my midterm project and make a network that controls and monitors events in my apartment.
For the midterm I built a Restian web service for the input to and output from devices in my apartment. I then set up a wifi-enabled Arduino to send a simulated sensor report to the internet. For the final, my goal is to build the proposed system with multiple sensors, controllable outputs, and controller devices.
I propose that the next version include the following devices and be built for the easy adding or removal of devices.
With this basic network is in place, I hope to have the framework well-developed for easy expansion and scaling.
