Last week we handed in our midterm projects. I have to say that I'm fairly proud of what we have achieved so far although we haven't made all our original ideas work exactly as we wanted them.
In the previous weeks I had posted our progress for this project, with sketches, pictures and videos of how we were doing and reporting on our ideas.
BUT THEN.... DISASTER STRUCK..
Our original structure collapsed. It was too big and thin to hold up it's own weight. In order to make such a structure work we had to spend more money and time than what we had available to ourselves so last minute we had to make some changes to our monster even though we had already made some parts work individually (sensors and LED matrixes).
The images above are the previous structure which collapsed and the start of the new structure made of foam cubes glued together and shaped into a sphere that's also been hollowed out. Because the monster is much smaller at this point, we reduce the amount of Ultrasonic Sensors that we're using from 5 to two plus the PIR Motion Sensor.
After the structure was perfected and we had foundations for teeth we covered the whole thing with a paper mache technique in order to get a smoother surface for the paint job and mounted the screen which worked as we had expected from our previous experiments. We created cardboard teeth and figured out the serial communication necessary to make our monster bark. This is what we presented on the week of our midterm as a project:
However we didn't think that this was good enough because the eye interaction was a little confusing, in the sense that people didn't really get that the eyes were following you depending on the position detected using the shortest distance from the sensor. We also had an issue with the sound where the serial kept playing the sound infinitely without stopping and our main issue was that we never figured out how to make the mouth open.
So for the following week we decided to work on all these issues and perfect our monster in time for a Halloween showing that would go in theme with a Mario Kart party. We also gave it a much better painting upgrade and better and cuter teeth.
We continued perfecting the eye motion which I think looks much more realistic now. At our teacher's request we scaled down to one Ultrasonic Sensor so that it could detect just presence at a certain distance and trigger the eye sequence which (depending on the position) will trigger different sounds. For the mouth, our teacher was kind enough to let us borrow a powerful solenoid piston in order to make it jump open slightly. At this point we managed to make the circuit/program work and we think we know how to mount it, but haven't gotten around to that yet.
