Term: Spring 2022
Instructor: Kate Hartman
Group Member:
Esther Zhang ([email protected]),
Yihan Zhao ([email protected]),
Tiange Hou ([email protected])
We started by setting up the board with Arduino Uno only to soon find out that it wasn’t powerful enough to drive the vibration motor to the desired amplitude, as previously mentioned in class, and quickly switched to a Uno set up which resolved the issue.
We tested with the example code “blink” from the arduino library to quickly get the vibrating motors work. The vibration was stronger than we initially expected, considering how inconspicuous the component appeared. There wasn’t a clear distinction between building and experiencing as we test it as we debug, which marked our first tactile experience with the motor. We observed visually and acoustically first, then all of us naturally proceeded with our hands, with most of the instances picking it up between the very tip of right index finger and thumb, and one resting it more towards the middle of the left index and middle finger.
We played with the high durations with 0.5 second, 1 second and 3 second. We found that the shortest delay between high periods was about 1 seconds that we could still feel.
duration = 0.5s
duration = 1s
duration = 3s
We modified the example code “fade” from arduino library to test out how will the duration of fading of the vibration affect the haptics level we could feel. We changed the fade amount to 1, 5, and 10. We noticed that the shorter the fade amount the more abrupt the motor spins up. We find moving up and down on an integer level produced noticeable results.
fadeAmount = 1
fadeAmount = 5
fadeAmount = 10
For this exercise we made the mistake of taping all three motors on the arm with a single strip of tape to simplify the fabrication at first, which conducted vibration throughout and eliminated the distinctions between three separate motors. We then updated to the separate tape design that allowed the exercise to behave as intended.