Category: Weekly Journal

As apart of the final month I have been working on the group tech project. My main role throughout this project was to code the braccio arm. The library for the braccio arm only included 1 function that made the arm move to where the motors degrees were set to so any movement code had to be done manually.

As a team we came to the conclusion to use 2 joysticks to make the arm move since we only had 5 servos (we used to have 6 but we removed 1) so with 2 joysticks we can move each individual part and use the z axis for both sticks to open and close the gripper.

The hardest part of this project for me was working with the quirks of c++ and arduino because while they are similar enough to python it has some things that it doesn’t allow due to being a lower level language. In the end we were able to get the arm fully moving and functioning

In this time I also worked on my essay about toxic online cultures. I wanted to explore some toxic online cultures and discuss why they are toxic. I explored parasocial relationships, family vlogging, online gambling in games and Roblox. I choose these 4 areas because they are a wide range of different communities that also link together nicely in how they are toxic.

This month has primarily been the easter break but during that time i had considered what kind of project would like to make. That is some sort of order generator that allows me to generate an order that tells me what i have to do no matter how absurd the order is.

The project only took about a week to make, I used an lcd and a piezo buzzer as apart of my project. The lcd screen prints each section of the order on a loop whilst the piezo buzzer plays a modified form of morse code that says “follow my orders”. In the brief it said I also need to use an led light but I found myself short on time so I decided not to include it.

right at the end of the month we began a group tech project. we mainly played around with the tech we had available to us and landed on using a braccio arm. In a sense we worked backwards from finding a problem and using tech to find a solution, instead we have found tech and will decided what problem we can find a solution for.

This month most of my time has been spent working on the machine learning project. during this project I have learnt about how a neural network, in terms of an AI, works through is layers and hidden calculations. I have also learnt about how AIs learn through a trial and error process where they go through multiple iterations of changing their internal calculations to eventually give a correct output.

As apart of the project I used a AI model called resnet18 to create an image recognition AI that can get an image a determine what is within it. The pretrained model is already able to distinguish between a variety of different objects so I had to changes its parameters in order to focus its efforts to only guess between chairs, trees and windows.

during this project I also learnt about using notebooks with jupyter lab which is a library for python and about string manipulation methods.

in the final week of the month I started the creative technology project, where we looked into using breadboards, arduino and sensors. I have experimented with using buzzers, LCD screens and lights which will help me with my project since I can use them during it.

This month I have been developing the AR project. I have found myself flipping between a few ideas for what I could do with the project. ideas that I had such as a lidar camera to visualise 3d space. however I found that the AR capabilities would not be good enough to actually portray what i want and i also wouldn’t have the time to fully develop it.

In the end i have decided to create an AR project that pastes textures on the wall. these textures would have words on them in different languages. This project has been quite draining due to the multitude of issues with Unity and the phones used to use the AR program.

over the 4 weeks in Febuary I have slowly developed my project to the point to where it can now display textures on a wall that can switch when a button is pressed but the texture on the wall stays completely white. I want to work on this issue during the spring break if possible otherwise i will need to get help some point in the near future to get things displaying correctly.

This month started with the second part of the algorithmic art project. I decided to create a mountain generator that functionally worked as a visualisation for an iterative function

I wanted to make the drawing customisable using a menu. which is why allowed the user to change the values of the calculation. while I am happy with how the project functions the drawing didn’t come out the way I was expecting it to.

after this project we had the banking hall project where for the wee we developed art using plotting machines and projections using p5.js with midi controllers. I found myself working with the p5.js more since I enjoyed the coding aspect a lot more.

in our last week of the month we began to look at AR, unity and blender. the project that I will be developing will be an AR project that starts with a black screen but allows you to project small 3d circles onto detected planes

i would kind of want it to be like those Lidar horror games just without the horror since I really like the effect that gets created.

This month i have been working on the p5.js grid project. I decided to to create an island maker. this island maker allows you to input land heights and trees into a grid which then informs the program how to build the island

to create this project I have had to use line equations and the quadratic formula to create the perspective of the island since everything is drawn on a 2d canvas. I have also been able to practice more with adding HTML via JS since it meant I didn’t need to create 200 individual grid squares.

Tuesday

on Tuesday we had a chance to develop our projects and get feedback / help with where we were currently at. During this day I spent my time developing a game page for my API project. Overall, I’m happy with the progress I have made so far but am finding it hard to get the data from the API and display it on the page

Wednesday

I spent time at home working on the project and learning how to use forEach to iteratively create functions for multiple inputs. This allowed me to finish the game page for the most part and it only requires bug testing to ensure everything works.

Thursday

Today was the final time we had to get feedback and develop our projects in a class environment. I learnt how to get a JSON file into my JavaScript, not realising how similar it was to calling an API. I also optimised my CSS to have less repetition. After documenting i had finally finished the final project for this unit.

Tuesday

We had a a workshop in the morning where I was able to ask for some guidence on how to get APIs for the data play project we are working on. I found a pokemon API that I plan to use for the project to display pokemon stats. In the afternoon I had my final javascript workshop where we covered string manipulation and did one last look at everything we have covered to ensure we understand as much as possible.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I went to the first student rep meeting for course where we discussed changes we would like in our course. One point i brought up was to have more creative Technorobotics between the creative computing.

Thursday

on this day we had a chance to work on our projects where I created the plans for my API project and began work on getting the API connected to the website using JavaScript.

Tuesday

in the morning we had a workshop on using APIs in websites where we learned how to get an API and how to display its data in HTML. Its going to be important for me to know how to do this due to my third set project requires the use of an API. In the afternoon we a workshop on functions in JavaScript. Thanks to working on the audio player project I feel like I understand how things work a lot better than I did at the start of last week.

Wednesday

I decided to work on completing my audio player today, At this point the only things I had left to do are the input bars for volume and current time in track, and adding more tracks.

in the end this how how it came out looking. I am very happy with it due to this being my first time properly making anything with JavaScript. Making this project has taught me alot about how JavaScript functions and it will help me when I use JavaScript in future projects.

Thursday

In the morning we had a lecture on storytelling and how it applies to computer science. they spoke about how due to AI being able to convey one’s own story within a project is very important because an AI cant replicate the human’s brain. I find storytelling very interesting so I would like to use some of the points discussed in any writing I do. In the afternoon we had time to work on our projects so I decided to begin research for the API project.

Tuesday

On this day we had more workshops on JavaScript and its uses within web development. We also began work on our audio player project. I’ve found starting the project to be quite easy for me since for now I have focused on the visuals through CSS and HTML and I will wait before adding any JavaScript.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I came in for student rep training. I found it interesting how student reps are supposed to work to bring issues to light in courses and across campus. There were multiple discussions of issues people are facing like the use of AI within the context of an arts Uni.

Thursday

We had someone come in from Sony to talk to us about their job and how they got there. they spoke about how the industry has changed since they began their career and how important it its to have a good network. In the afternoon we had time to work on our projects. During this time I was able to roughly finish how the layout looks. I may make changes as they become necessary.