Prototype Photos :: 12.11.05

Perf board and breadboard prototypes from earlier this weekend. And. a picture of my because Jenny says we need one of those here too. Personally, I don't believe her.

Summary

Segment Tags aim to allow for the personalization of space and objects in an environment. Through the use of interactive displays users can create their own tag or message without the destruction of property. Visitors of a restaurant, bar, or public space are encourage to leave a word, thought, question or message of what's on heir mind with relation to their surroundings. The intent is to open a dialog between visitors who share a space at different times.

Walls, furniture, and objects don't commonly allow people to leave their mark or capture a thought. The desire for people to leave traces of their presence can be seen in graffiti, guest books, customized cars, blogs, and bumper, where we leave behind signs that we have been someplace and have something to say. As individuals, we desire the ability to leave a bit of our selves in an environment. Segment Tags bridge this gap by providing people the opportunity to leave a few words behind.

PIC Code and the 1414

Yesterday Jenny Karl and I worked mainly on the software side. Karl worked on making the text display scrollable, while Jenny and I worked on implementing edge detection for the cursor and letter selection. One big ah-ha happened when we realized that the decoder in the 1414 cal translate string character like "A". This saves a lot of time because we no longer need to send the IC binary.

1414 Smart Display Photos

On top: Karl & Jenny setting up the 1414 on the board. On the bottom: The 1414 smart 16-segment display. This display is great. It's easy to setup and easy to send data to. ASCII characters are sent to the display where they are decoded, stored in memory, and multiplexed. The character size is small but the LEDs are bright and make up for their size in brightness.

Research

A compilation of resources for setting up 7 and 16-segment displays and drivers. Practical Electronics for Inventors gives a great explanation of displays in the appendix. We've been working with 7-segment and 16-segment LED displays.

Display Drivers/ICs
MM5450 :: 7-Segment LED display driver. We set this chip up to drive up four seven shipment displays. Multiplexing needs to be used in order to drive eight displays instead of just the four.
MAX6954 :: 16-Segment LED display driver can power up to eight displays (on order)
Allegro shift register - ...

Displays
Seven segment from Radio Shack
Dual seven segment
Sixteen segment display
HPDL1414 :: "Smart" Alphanumeric Display include embedded IC, driver, latch decoder and character fonts (ordered waiting for delivery).

Resources
Maxim 16-Segment display tutorial

Setup

The blog documenting our Physical Computing final is alive and well. Even though there are only a few weeks Left tin the semester, capturing what we do is important. Instead of creating a documentation page for the project, it's easier to create something we can all edit.