After Phase 3: Mid-High Fidelity Prototyping, I’ve continued to develop and build the final interface set-up for 10 November (Week 13).

At this stage, I aim to complete 99% of the final project outcome. The remaining 1% relates to minor aesthetic additions such as interaction guides (ie “press here”, “choose a mood”, etc) for End of Semester showcase.

0. Milestone for continued Mid-High-Fidelity Prototype (interaction + final interface):

The following is a documentation of how I got to this stage above.

1. Circuit Refinements since last update @ Week 12:

Since my last work-in-progress update on Week 12, I have revised the push buttons used. This is to better accommodate users’ interaction, as the buttons are bigger and not super tiny/inaccessible and hidden amongst the circuit and wires. I have also revised the circuit arrangement to better house and increase ease of accessibility to my project’s internal components.

Here are the new buttons used:

Here’s a comparison of the new push button (left) vs the original one I used (right):

Also as mentioned above, I have revised the wiring of my circuit. I opted to use shorter connecting wires instead of having the jumper wires stretch across the whole breadboard and hindering the structure/shape of my container (which will be shown below in this documentation):

As I was making my connections and measurements, I realised I needed to accommodate for even more connections for GND and 5V as there were alot of wirings I haven’t attached yet.

2. Building the user interface (buttons-LED box):

**Ideally, without hardware, budget, software, time constraints, the doll device + buttons box would be built into 1 interactive interface device. This device is meant to be small and portable enough for desktop placement.**

However, due to the nature of the project, I had to make do with what resources were available to the best of my abilities, and sell this as a proof of concept for my project idea. Thus, this prototype has 2 parts as explained below.

After finalising my circuit layout and components used, I can finally begin to create the housing container to present my project with. There are 2 parts of the user interface to build in my project:

1. Mood indicator buttons that users press to indicate and relay their mood
(via push button + LED pin light, housed in buttons box)

2. Attention indicator touch sensors that users tap to indicate and relay their physical intentions.
(via touch sensor + LED pin light, housed in 3D-printed human model)

Due to hardware constraints, I had to use and stack 2 breadboards on top of each other to best present the Button-LED interactivity. Here, I added extra foam board supports at the base to make sure the structure does not topple when unattended and handled.

Additional structure supports:

Then, the rest of the container was built to house buttons and LED lights:

I also decided to create a ‘platform’ for the human model to stand, to add cohesion and to package the project’s interaction and interfaces nicely together.

Here’s a short timelapse of construction/assembly:

Since my project is about 2-way relaying of communications, I’ve used a Master-Slave 12C on Arduino Uno. As such, I would have to produce 2 button boxes + 2 human models in total, one for each receiving/sending end.

Here are the 2 boxes:
Notice the Slave side has a smaller container than the Master. This is partly due to hardware accommodation as well as the Master has additional buttons to control.

//End of Mid-High Fidelity Prototyping (continued) documentation