Week 9!

Didn't do much, ordered my materials that needed to be ordered and they'll be in by the end of the week!

Project Idea!

Okay, so.
Gonna build a little walk in exhibit of sorts.
Attach lights to it that'll sync up to music.
The lights will h hanging from the ceiling!

Materials needed:

-Leds (Ordered! Two five meter strips and one sample strip!*
-Plywood or some other reasonably cheap building material (in the process of getting)
-a spool of silky black cloth (in the process of getting)
-Door hinges!
-Aurduino (Got one!)
>Laptop (Got one!)
>Power tools (Got 'em)
Gonna blow your minds, I hope.

Chapter 3 and 4 notes

Our minds control motion and senses that can be manipulated into thinking something that is not true, but it feels true. These are called phantom pains.  Our brains are just not wired the way technology is. Humans can not do the regular things that computers do like remember a long list of instructions or sequences.

There is a feeling of being in another place and not the place you are really in. For example, when you are in a car chatting away on the on the phone. You are physically in the car, but your mind is elsewhere, you disassociate with your physical form in the favor of your mental one! The idea of telepresence has the same notion. It uses technology to control something in another place. 

Phantom Pains are a pain in the butt, huh? Feeling something and KNOWING that your body is missing that limb, but your brain is like 'nah man, your arm itches...scratch it.''

Neural Opportunism: Data processing bandwidth 

Our perception is limited! 

Meta knowledge: Rapid decision making

Baseline knowledge: stable source of information

change blindness: pretty much not remembering what you just saw
Fovea
Intentional blindness: failing to notice something that's in front of you when you're distracted by something else.

Week...uh...8?

Ahhhh.
My group forgot to do the reading, I was the only one who actually did it.
I felt bad because Thomas was upset and it felt like it was my fault for not reminding them.
I hope they don't get in trouble.
Also I made a thing.

I tried uploading a video of it messing with a fan, but it refused, oh well.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

The Good:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Walker-Robot/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Playful-Puppy-Robot/
-Simple design and layout allows for easy modding and changes to the physical design
I personally plan to scale up the concept of the Puppybot, should funds allow, while adding the ability to walk on its own and avoid obstacles like the simple walker robot.

The Bad *but it's so cool*
http://www.instructables.com/id/EZ-Robot-Controlled-Lost-in-Space-B9-Robot/
http://www.instructables.com/id/chicken-walking-robot/

The Ugly:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Ugly-Duckling-Robot/

Some notes from chapters 1 and 2

-It was Manfred Clynes who actually first suggested the term “cyborg.”
-The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.
-As an acronym, cyborg stands for Cybernetic Organism or Cybernetically Controlled Organism
-The first cyborg was a white lab rat without a name, this rat had a simple implanted Rose osmotic pump
-The Rose pump was named so after its inventor, Dr. Rose.
-Rose incorporates a pressure pump capsule capable of delivering injections at a controlled rate.
-People with pacemakers could also be considered cyborgs to a degree!
- Cochlear implants electronically stimulate the auditory nerves, because of this, they enable many profoundly deaf humans to hear again
-However, they are currently limited by requiring the presence of a healthy, intact and non degenerated nerve
-We humans didn’t always keep precise, objectively measured time.
-Information appliances are characterized by three central features:
1. An information appliance is geared to support a specific activity, and to do so via the storage, reception, processing, and transmission of information.
2. Information appliances form an intercommunicating web. They can “talk” to each other.
3. Information appliances are transparent technologies, designed to be easy to use, and to fade into the background. They are poised to be taken for granted.
-A cyborg is a being with both organic and biomechatronic parts.
-The term was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline D. S. Halacy's Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 .
-Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist, said that technology products we use today need to be learned how to use them and is not simple and reliable.  -Tangible computing is when the human is interacting with technology, and the interaction is meant to be as natural as possible. This displays technology being created to be used with the human interface.

Week 7

We had critique this week, people seemed to like my project, which made me happy.
I'll be working on it at home, tweaking it so it's perfect for turning in towards the end of the semester,
We were introduced to arduino, it's simply amazing.
The codes reminds me a lot of Java script coding wise, so I think I can ease into something fairly easily.

Week 6

Nothing to see here, move along folks.
Just worked on my noise project at home, nothing special.

Billy Bastard

Billy The Bigmouth Bass: A lesson in patience
In the end we still couldn't get him to sing proper, but at least he can change pitch based on light.
I'll redo him later, yes.

It was a fun project, just very tiring and stressful towards the end.