Blog - Sketching with Hardware

Day 4 – Work in Progress

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The Team

Team 5 consists of Nils Holland-Cunz, who is currently doing his Bachelor in Medieninformatik, and Alexander Leupold, currently doing his Master in Computer Science.

Keyboard Hacking

On the first day, our task was to do a simple keyboard hack. We came up with the idea to build two controllers for the browser game curvefever.com. We used two tilt switches per controller and soldered them to the keyboard circuit board.

Our simple controllers for curvefever – worked pretty well!

Our Arduino Project: BlueTo

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After having learnt the basics of electronics on the first day, it was time to get going and learn something about Arduino – the platform we are using to realize our projects. It’s an open source hardware platform which uses an Atmel AVR microcontroller and has several input and output pins to attach all different kinds of hardware. These can be sensors, LEDs, buttons, switches, servos and motors, everything we need for our projects.

Thus, day two was intended to give us a detailed introduction into Arduino, it’s IDE, wiring circuits and using all the electronic components. Here are some of the things we learned:

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It seems like the overall slogan of today is “gather your energy”! Not only that some teams look pretty tired from working till late in the past few days. No, most of the teams are facing energy/power issues right before the presentation. But in the end each team presented their projects in a charming and confident way. And even the jurors are blown away from the overall topic and the ideas.

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Only one day left until the final presentation, this last full working day was not the 6^th, but actually the 8^th day, as most teams worked on their projects on the weekend. Almost all teams had still major problems to solve, so an intense and long last day was to be expected.

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At the fith day, the project status of the teams are very different. Some have already finished their housings or are working on a very detailed level, others are still challenged with big mechanical or electronical problems. Although there are long waiting periods to use the laser cutter, most of the teams are very optimistic to hit the deadline at tuesday (perhaps with some extra hours at the weekend!).

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Our Team

Team 4 consisted of Max Hackenschmied and Nicki Schäfer. Max is doing his Master Degrees in Human-Computer-Interaction and has already a lot of experience in programming, Nicki is studying Industrial Design at the Technical University in Munich and a complete beginner in programming or hacking stuff.

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The Idea
With the topic of UGVs (unmanned ground vehicle) we immediately wanted to create something that could help you in a playful way. While we were driving the car along on table we came up with an idea. The Cardinator 3000: a card dealing robot.
It will drive along the edges of the table, detects the players and deals cards to them. After the dealing process is finished it will stop and wait that cards will be inserted again so it can deal another round.

The Concept
Our vehicle has a card box with a motor that draws cards from the bottom of the card stack. In front of the box is a light barrier that detects when a card was pulled out. And there is also a light barrier on the back side of the box to detect if there are any cards left. An ultrasonic sensor on the left side of the car detects a player when the car drives by. It stops than and deals a card. To stay on the table the car has two infrared distance sensors mounted on the front-left and rear-left bottom of the vehicle. To initially start the dealing process and to control the vehicle we designed and Android App that communicates via an HC-05 Bluetooth module with the controller of the vehicle (an Arduino UNO).

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The Great Carholio

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