Hey Nippers! Just wanted to say hello and thank you for all the good times in Amsterdam. I think a lot of foundations are being laid for really interesting work (ensemble anyone?? :-)). Anyways I’ll try post regularly. First I will try to share some conversations I had with Jorgen. My biggest problem with the current airstick design is related to the angle the beam of most infrared rangers. I doesn’t have a straight line beam but more of a cone, where every obstacle in the way will be detected. Of course sometimes this angle is not desirable. You can take a look at the sharp infrared rangers specification here:

http://www.acroname.com/robotics/info/articles/sharp/sharp.html

The workaround could be to make a little tube that would be placed at the end of the emitter lens and make the infrared beam narrower (maybe a straw cylinder, fused with a conic end). This would make the pulses bounce inside the tube.

Another issue is that I noticed some people needed an introduction to the basic electronics of building physical interfaces. There is tons of material on the web but a more comprehensive cookbook would be better to start with. Thus I recommend Dan O’ Sullivan’s resources. It’s an excellent book that pretty much touches all the initial subjects in a light approach:

http://www.physicalcomputing.com/

See ya!
Ivan

This entry was posted by Ivan on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 7:22 am and is filed under NIP Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.