Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Make Cycle #3:

for my make cycle 3, I felt as if I would have no trouble finding a toy to hack, and relating it to the mechanical heart replacement...  That however, was not the case.  After searching for toys to hack, I realized that I had no toys...  My room mate was kind enough to lend me his only toy, Bucky-Balls.  I first decided to make a human heart out of the Bucky-Balls and make a stop animation, but it was very difficult to arrange the magnetic balls in such a complicated shape, so my search continued...  I went into my other room mate's room, and saw a crumpled and smashed set of headphones and it hit me.  I could do the math to find the frequency that a human heart beats at and recreate it with pulses through the headphones.  As I did the video, things went perfectly.  That stopped very soon though.  As I was uploading, my iPhone decided to flip the video 180 degrees.  After downloading new software to flip the video, I finally was able to upload the video.  All-in-all, I feel good about my project, and feel that it represented the science questions that I posed very well.  I really enjoyed this make cycle.

Edit:  This is a picture of some of the testing that I did before I actually took apart the headphone for Make Cycle #3.
I used the big speaker to easily hear and see the pulses made by the computer and confirm that the headphone wasn't completely broken  I cut up the headphone jack and wired everything so that the bass and treble sounds were both run through the speakers.

2 comments:

  1. For the amount of complications you had with the idea and video it came out pretty well. Like I always say, I enjoy seeing your creativity (though its too bad for the head phones).

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  2. It sounds like you had plenty of frustrating setbacks during your make process but I'm glad it finally worked out for you.

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