animata and max

Making a puppet of yourself was fun, but it was a little bit frustrating when the puppet doesn't move on how you want it to move. It was a really bad decision of giving up on my first task. On the second one I did not gave up though, I tried all my best and I did it. I made a puppet with a background. Ones you know what you are doing and have learnt on how the bones move, it's not that hard to do it. It gets faster and easier.

After making a puppet we now have to move on to a very DIFFICULT task, controlling a puppet using a keyboard/mouse and the max program. the fun bit that i find in this task is dissecting keyboards and mouse. I like opening things apart, fixing it and trying to put it back together again. We have to hack these electronic device (e.g mouse and keyboard) and control our puppet using the MAX program. MAx program has given me a headache. It was so hard to understand and I couldn't work it out. I sat in front of my precious laptop trying to figure out how it work, searching for tutorials and still my brain hasn't absorbed it. Most people in my class have chosen to use keyboard, and I heard that it is easier than the mouse. On the other hand I have chosen to use mouse to give myself a challenge. And I did. The mouse only has limited input capabilities than the keyboard. While doing the task, I have now experienced that programing is really hard and not that easy, but if I keep on trying I know that I can do it, I just need to be patient with it.

I did not manage to make my animata puppet work using the max program. However, we went through it again as I wasn't alone struggling in this task. After going through it I just found out that max5 is so much easier and better than max4.6.

Drawing Machine

Last week we were given a task to make a NXT lego robot that drew. The robot must produce 3 drawings and it must also respond to sound, light, distance, touch and incorporate pre-programmed protocol responses.

Me and my group came up with our own ideas and shared it within the group. most of the ideas were good but we were limited with materials or complicated. In the end my group decided to make a simple drawing machine that draw using salt. We've come across some problems and re-built our robot many times one of the problem was using sand to draw. The sand is not as fine like the salt so it was hard for the sand to come out of the dispenser. Although the salt is really fine, there were blocks of salt sometimes that block the dispenser.

The robot moves using the light sensor where it find the difference between light and dark colour and it moves around. When we put our robot to the test, we walked around Queen Street to find patterned floor or ground. We found some patterned floor but the robot couldn't read the pattern or the difference between the colour of the patterned floor.

In the end, we tried to test the robot on the parking lot and the robot read the yellow line and followed the line. it was a really successful test but during the presentation the robot failed and didn't follow the line and that we did.