Yesterday I came to ITP and laser cut two more enclosures at a larger size (and failed to take photos of the process, but will take more later of the finished project). I made two because the wood was curved and I wasn't sure if they all would fit. It turned out that was true -- Ben Light was right, these boxes are tricky! However it still seemed like the best option for me at the moment to make sure it would stay together.
In the afternoon Jim and I met up to make some new breathing visualizations. We added a "breathing rectangle" that grows up and down the screen, and a polygon that unfolds open with your breath cycle. We also beautified the "gui" or computer program pages he had started in P5. He also showed me how to "beautify" my code! Which is also helpful to find mistakes or places where you forgot a bracket or where it is broken.
Today we met again and wired up the new enclosure. Everything fit, however I think the enclosure could still be improved upon, maybe if I use flatter wood and also take my time more with glueing, as it was a bit of an ordeal trying to glue it last night, partially bc my plan was not thought out and I assumed it would be simpler than it turned out to be. I got some glue marks all over it which I think I could avoid in the future by removing excess glue with a dry cloth.
It was helpful to wire up the new enclosure because it reminded us of how we organized the wiring on the Arduino/Breadboard, and also made it clearer how we would repeat it in the future if needed, and what we would change.
We also attempted adding a heart LED onto the wristband which would also blink with the user's heartbeat, but for some reason that is not working yet, maybe because the LED is broken? We will troubleshoot later.
Next up we will:
- Meet with Tom tomorrow afternoon for feedback before we continue.
- Troubleshoot the heart LED on wristband
- Update the heartbeat detection algorithm with Jim's reworked code to read the heart rate intelligently guess where missing heartbeats would go, to make the sound more consistent.
- Possibly add an option to view the heart rate.
- Have the dropdown menu show up when viewing the visualizations.
- Finish coding the "challenge" vs "duration" options and how those will work.
- Record audio guide