For our midterm project in Yury Gitman's Interactive Major Studio, we made a teddy bear that had a beating heart, lungs, and tons of sensors that felt chest compressions, its physical orientation (with an accelerometer, ) the instruments placed into its mouth, and a magnet to trip the switch we placed in the "paddle" that would restart his heart.

Here is how the trauma bear play testing went down (maddest possible props to Tracy for editing this):

and here's a clip of what we did leading up to this:

Cisco Systems - Binary Game - Cisco.com - [My del.icio.us]

Thanks to Lena Ghaleb for sending me this. I think this game would be really useful for teaching the basics of binary in a lot of contexts. Nice example of worthwhile educational game--fun and challenging.

So I had some free time during this break (not really, but I didn't feel like doing the work I'm supposed to do.) I've been wondering for a while if we could have made the infrared (IR) stuff work, so I posed that as a challenge for myself. Turns out, it wasn't all that hard.

First thing I had to do was make a IR camera. Very easy. Initially, I just taped two pieces of photo negative to my webcam (the darkest stuff at the end of the strip.) That worked well enough to pick up the LEDs shining out of a remote control.

Then I got a little more adventurous and hacked open the webcam. That was pretty much just one screw and some careful dismantling of the rest. Right in front of the lens is a square of iridescent glass; that's the IR filter. I popped that out with a screwdriver (it kind of chipped at first until I broke away enough to pry the whole thing out.) I replaced it with two small squares of the negative and put the thing back together. Props to Cameron Browning for teaching me this trick.

Here are a few snaps of our build day on Sunday for the Trauma Bear project. It has really come together:

Guts Of the Machine

On the heels of our wildly successful play test of the trauma bear, I bring to you images of the ursine innards.

Arduino

Breadboard

Breadboard and Arduino Connected

And here's a brief video of the experience:

So, we've got that main processing code ready to go! Sort of. Inti has kicked ass getting the physical states codified, and the processing code looks great with the graphics that Tracy posted. I now need to combine the physical pieces that Jay has built for the intubation and ventilator and accelerometer (all of which are killer!) with the Arduino code with the finished state machine and get the thing running.

Very, very soon, this bear will live! And then die!

Processing code is attached below.