Kea - Spring 25 Electronic Objects

     This week I completed the base fabrication of my project. I have all the electronic parts and will work on assembling them next week. I emailed these images but will also include them here: I've added a semi-quilted piece to cover the laundry basket turned cradle. I added a mobile and a faux baby. The baby should weigh just a little over 4 pounds. I hope that knowing this will be helpful to me in the next steps. I will bring the electronic pieces on Tuesday to begin coordinating that part of the project.  I am a little concerned about how to keep the load cell level. There is a solid base to the cradle, but the whole piece rocks. Setting the baby in doesn't make it rock, but it makes me wonder if the load cell placement will need to be very specific in order to read properly. 

This week I got all of my supplies ordered and started work on fabricating the shell of the project. The amazon arduino that can play sound arrived and I am still waiting for the load cell and load cell amplifier.  I looked at the videos, but I haven't been putting in the time to learn every part of touch designer. I am not going to use it and I don't want to spend the many hours it would take to learn it if it won't serve my practice. I think it's helpful to get a general idea for how it works, but I'm not going to gain any sort of proficiency. My interest in electronic components remains with the basics of audio playing. I am not interested in distorting my audio or anything like that.   I spent time in the studio working on fabricating the physical core of my artwork. Instead of buying a bassenett and spending more money, I'm making my own out of a pillow and a laundry basket. In the final rendering it will be covered so that it isn't obviously a laundry ...

 Feb 4 2025  I got a small win! I figured a very very simple way to set parameters so that I could get instructions for what to wear in the weather, rather than just the temperature as numbers.  I worked on finding some links for my project. I think that the main components I will need is a mp3 shield (I even found one that takes a microSD), a load cell, a load cell amplifier, and a speaker. I think that those should be the major electronic components. I'm starting to feel more excited, because I think this is something that I actually could do. Even so, I see the limits of my knowledge as I am trying to decode all the jargon in the online listenings, figure out exactly what does what, and what other components I need to have with them. I've been emailing you, but here are the links I was looking at again.   Some links that I found: load cell:  https://www.adafruit.com/product/4543?gQT=1     load cell amplifier:  https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-...

  I'm late this week, because I completely forgot about this. My biggest success would be finally getting a little bit of a grip on the Labs. I was feeling very confused and discouraged, but at least now I have a little bit of confidence.  Some Questions that I had from the lab were: Don’t understand the difference between print and println Why doesn't it work with built in led? I don’t know why we'd divide by 4? We discussed all of these in class. I learned that the difference between print and println is that it creates a new line, and that placing lines certain places allows the data to be displayed in the visual graph.  It didn't work with the built in LED because the oscillating, the quickly turning on and off, can't be done in the built in LED and we need that to create a varied degrees of brightness because we need to fake it being analogue. That was not a very eloquent way to put it.  We talked about my project in class. I need to get a load cell and somethi...