Meeting 21 – 25.03.2009

Research about color and texture has been made for discussing the design choices of the eMoodies’ colors and character of their textiles.

Textile samples were collected  on March 9th and tested with our LEDs. We found some fabrics that would be suitable for the eMoodies.

The discussion lead to the following design decisions:

• Mary will have a soft and yellow fabric.
• Cory will have a blue, shiny and thin fabric
• Steve will have a black, fuzzy and unruly fabric

 

Textiles were purchased today at Myrins Textil and Panduro in Gothenburg.

Unique features for each eMoody

Due to constraints concerning time, budget and available components a decision has been made to equip each eMoody with a unique feature. We believe that a personal technical feature of its own will help distinguish an eMoody from the others.

The angry and bully eMoody Steve will be equipped with a vibrating motor.

The mellow and sensitive eMoody Cory will be equipped with a microphone (yes, audio input is back on track and already finished).

The social and positive eMoody Mary will be equipped with either a piezo element for playing melodies and sounds or an accelerometer for detecting physical movement.

More information about these choices will be posted.

The hardware structure of an eMoody

This is an likely overview over how the inner hardware structure of an eMoody will be designed.

Batteries. 6 1.2 volts or 1.5 volts will be used for powering the Arduino microcontroller and the rest of the components.

Control circuit. This circuit will hold 3 shift registers that the Arduino will use for controlling all LEDs. The batteries will also be connected here to an embedded small curcuit fo enabling output of both 9 volts and 5 volts depening on the components.

Face circuit. Holds the 25 LEDs, 25 resistors and 6 transistors for creating the different facial expressions of an eMoody.

Other circuits. Smaller circuits for vibrating motors, accelerometers, speakers and so on will be connected to the control circuit.

Audio input likely to be ignored

Initially, an idea was that the eMoodies should react  in different ways to sounds like  a door slamming or hands clapping. This idea has been moved to the bottom of our priority scale due to the following reasons.

First, we don’t have much money left in our budget for the microphone we want to buy.  

Second, our microphone of choice demands a lot of wiring and there might not be enough pins available on the Arduino microcontroller. Solving this will also be resource demanding.

Third, at this point we don’t have time looking for, ordering and testing another kind of microphone.

Fourth, audio input (despite being cool) was never one of the must-have features of an eMoody.