Week 6!

Monday

IMG_0946This weekend was quite busy! On Saturday, SROC and the ProHealth REU program students traveled to the Cincinnati area and visited the Freedom Center, downtown. That was a fascinating opportunity to learn about both historical and modern forms of slavery, as well as the history of the Underground Railroad. After our museum tour, we traveled to Kings Island, an amusement park outside of the city. It was a very nice day and we had a lot of fun. Suggestions for next year: Leave earlier to have more park time (get more bang for your buck) and tell the students to eat breakfast and bring their own lunch because the snacks only got us so far.

On Sunday, Sam and I conducted our Beta Test for the participatory design workshop that we will be facilitating on paper circuits. We used 6 SROC students and worked with them through the three activities that we plan to facilitate for the actual workshop with older adults. It was successful. Sam and I will analyze our notes this week to learn more about what we should do do have a more positive experience with the older adults. The activity sheet that we used was: PaperCircuitsWorkshop PD Check out Sam’s blog for the details on the notes she took!

On Monday morning, we worked to organize our personal websites and blogs. I had to make changes to prevent a cut-off screen on tablets and mobile devices. Here is another link to my website:  http://psutea.wix.com/olivia   In addition, we worked on refining our Reviewer Response tables. Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UO4t2PBtXMTUcAYocXN_AIDN4lK9EaahuGELoEQ3jno/edit?usp=sharing

Also, we spent most of the morning refining our paper circuit activities for the participatory design workshop. We decided that for the third activity, there will be three components including: a sheet with 2 batteries connecting across the paper using copper tape, a sheet that connects to the first using copper tape and a buzzer/vibe motor, and another sheet that connects to the first with an LED attached. With this as a third activity for the older adults, there are more complications and you use an output as well. But, we discovered this morning that you need to use a second 3V battery in order to have enough power to light the LED and power the vibe motor.

After eating lunch, we spent sompin13withaccelometer(withBen)e time looking into the work of Leah Buchley in regards to Lilypad Arduino and accelerometers. We found some of her code used in lighting an RGB LED while someone moved in their shirt. But, since we don’t have much of a background in Arduino without the use of ArduBlock, it was difficult to understand.

We then had a meeting with Ben and discpin13withaccelorometerwithben picussed how the Beta Test went on Sunday evening and how we can improve to have a more successful workshop. Also, we went over the basics of coding with the accelerometer, which didn’t feel like basics! We will continue to iterate until we figure out the best location and process to accomplish our goal.

 

Tuesday

Today, Sam and I began the day reading over our peer review’s from last week, inputting them into our Reviewer Response Table and making the necessary changes within our paper.

Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 12.27.41 PM Then, we had a meeting with Katie to discuss our progress and get necessary guidance. She also mentioned a tool that could be very helpful for our participatory design workshops,  and even notetaking back at Penn State, called the LiveScribe. I will most likely buy it! 🙂    & Just like every other Tuesday morning, we had an excellent meeting. I always walk away from the meetings feeling more confident and able to accomplish the ever growing list of tasks.Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 12.27.26 PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We talked oScreen Shot 2016-06-28 at 12.27.46 PMver the plans we made yesterday with Ben about the way that we will utilize our accelerometer to track sleep for our quilt. We worked with Katie to read the X, Y, Z data off of the accelerometer.  There was a ton of data to work with because Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 12.33.45 PMit records the data by the millisecond or some other very small unit of a second. I did draw everything out in a Fritzing diagram and that did clear things up. When she ran through the code to just track the data, it felt quite straightforward.

Wednesday

Today was a very productive day.

Sam and I worked from home this morning. We wanted to test the accelerometer in various places on a real blanket and get data. Our goal is to find the ideal place to sew the accelerometer into our quilt to track sleep time based on movement of the person under the quilt.

We realized that keeping the accerelometer in one place wasn’t an easy task. IMG_0973 IMG_0976 At first, we used safety pins to hold it in place but unfortunately, the alligator clips slid around and through the pin and didn’t stay in place. Next, we tried to use scotch tape to hold it the accelerometer in place on the blanket and the adhesive wasn’t strong enough to hold the device on the blanket. Once that didn’t work, I remembered that I had duct tape and it worked! But, the pitfall was that we couldn’t see through the tape to check and make sure that the accelerometer had X, Y, and Z components in the right direction.

But, we did get good data for 4 out of the 5 trials. For each trial, I rolled around under the blanket to see the range of data that the accelerometer would show on the serial monitor when someone was trying to get comfortable befoIMG_0984re falling asleep. We hope to set the accelerometer to detect sleep by this type of data being within a certain range.

Once we collected the data from the serial monitor, we pasted it into Arduino and then turned the .ino file into a .csv file in order for Excel to open the data. In Excel, we made line graphs of the data.

Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 9.59.57 AM

After doing all of that work from home, we came into the lab for Professional Picture Day which was lovely. Also, we had our weekly Wednesday seminar where we talked about making a poster, presenting a poster, and giving a Lightning Talk. We had a few good ideas about visuals for our presentation to grab the attention of our audience and show the significance of our work.

We also had a meeting with Ben. We discussed our current progress and his current progress. He mentioned how recruitment is going. He had a meeting at Bell Trace, a local senior living center, and plans to try to conduct a participatory design workshop there as part of a Fabric Arts class that they hold weekly. Bell Trace also has a need for volunteers to help older adults with technology questions. That seems quite interesting to me.  Also, he went to meet the local lap quilting group on Tuesday and plans to observe their practices next week. He wants us to finish our the prototype to our prototype before Lap Quilting on Tuesday morning to have something to show people who wonder how we incorporate electronics into craft.

Thursday

IMG_0988 Today was quite a busy day as usual. We spent the morning working on iterations on our paper. We spent the most time fleshing out our findings and discussion because we will draft those sections next week. I spent time further iterating on my professional website and blog.

Around 10:30am, we went down to prototyping lab to working on finishing the prototype to our prototype. IMG_0990 IMG_0995
Those are the original first quilts with the frogs on them. I ran into lots of trouble with threading the conductive thread.20160630_115319 It wasn’t easy to do. We definitely could have used a needle threader for the conductive wire. Once I completed all of my pathways, I spent two hours hand-sewing the extra conductive thread around the electronic components to make strong, solid connections.

A few hours later, once the connections were made and the Lilypad was sewn into the board, I had to complete the Arduino/Ardublock code and added another digital pin to the code that I had for a button to control one LED. I then connected the Lilypad to the computer and nothing but one LED lit up, on accident, before I uploaded the new code to the Lilypad.

After a half hour of troubleshooting, I asked Mentor Ben to come to the prototyping lab to help. He did help. We used a voltmeter in the process to check voltage but it wasn’t that. After another half hour of attempting to find a solution, we realized that i left a bunch of conductive thread together, beneath the blanket and missed it. Once all of the wire was taped onto the blanket and separated, IT WORKED! The button controlled the two LEDs with occasional flashing.

Friday

Sam and I began the day with a lot of failure while attempting to use the Arduino accelerometer duo again to tIMG_1002est shaking the blanket and using the heat sensor. The Arduino continually couldn’t be identified by my Mac USB port for some unknown reason. I switched Arduino parts and even restarted my computer but still couldn’t get it all to work.

After an hour of troubleshooting, we came to the informatics building and worked on blogging and then went to the weekly ProHealth Design Update Meeting! It was nice to hear progress and what everyone is up to.