Annoy-tron 3000

I'm currently working on a little project with my buddy Ben. The goal of the project is to make something that will annoy Allen. The electronics we build for this project can definitely be used for other, more potentially profitable purposes I believe. The idea of the project is to embed a temperature sensor, Arduino and buzzer in an 3D printed dildo. By themselves, Arduinos can only generate square waves which are super obnoxious when very high pitched. I envision a typical interaction going as follows. A user will be presented with a screeching dildo. He or she will be told that he or she can only turn it off if they can heat up the dildo past a certain threshold. After furiously heating up the dildo, it will eventually turn off. The interaction here is quite simple, but this project entails an interesting technical challenge. We have to embed an arduino, on/off switch, buzzer, temperature sensor, battery and charging implement in a prosthetic phallus. The on/off switch has to be sufficiently difficult to reach that the user is incentivized to rub the dildo instead of trying to turn it off. We also need to able to charge the battery while still plugged into the Arduino.

In future posts I'll put up some pictures so Ben and I can track our progress. 

Jterm 2016 - UAE and Oman

Over J-term, I had the opportunity to leave coding, electronics and Physics aside for a few weeks. I took a class in which we travelled all over the UAE and part of Oman. I was able to make some new friends and spend some quality time with my boy Eder. The class itself was interesting as well. In principle, the purpose of the class was to study the interaction between three different landscapes in the region (Oasis, Coast and Mountain, also the name of the course). In my mind the overriding themes of the class were water management, increased dependence on modern economies, and the interaction between place, state, and identity.

Final Project for Interactive Media

While I've been concentrating a lot on plotting cool systems of differential equations, I want to move my attention a little to the realm of making physically interactive systems. My final project for interactive media is a good example of the kind of stuff that I want to investigate in the coming weeks. My inspiration for the project was the thought that I might be able to feel a virtual electric field. By virtual, I mean that I wouldn't be actually creating an electric field and using a physical sensor to detect it. Instead, I place a virtual point charge at some point in space, and by moving her hand about in the neighboring space, a user can feel how the magnitude of the field changes.