Computational Design Lab

CoDe Lab projects at 2012 Maker Carnival Beijing

Huaishu — Sun, 06 May 2012 12:57:52 +0000

Posey, Sketchchair, Piccolo, Speakerwire and Algo.Rhythm, five projects designed and developed by CoDe Lab alumnus and current student Michael Philetus Weller, Greg Saul, Tiago Rorke, Cheng Xu and Huaishu Peng, demonstrated at the very first Maker event in Beijing, the 2012 Beijing Maker Carnival. Algo.Rhythm got reported by a local newspaper.

Piccolo at E.G 6 Conference

Huaishu — Sun, 06 May 2012 12:23:05 +0000

Recognized for it’s unique design and great potential, Piccolo, the tiny CNC robot (invented by CoDeLab alumni and current student), got invited for a demonstration at the E.G. Conference, an interdisciplinary conference gathering innovators in media, technology, entertainment and education.

Sketch It, Make It

johnsogg — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 21:35:45 +0000

Sketch It, Make It (SIMI) is a modeling tool for designing items to laser cut. Unlike traditional interfaces that rely on modes and discrete keyboard and mouse input, SIMI recognizes rough, hand-drawn input. It interprets this as linework (e.g. lines, arcs), editing commands (e.g. erasing) or geometric constraints (e.g. right angle or same-length).

We are currently looking at ways to bring this out of the lab and into “the real world” in some way.

Help vote for CoDe labber Deren Guler’s project Inventabling!

derthere — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:44:36 +0000

Deren and her friend Anya are finalists for the Children’s Museum Makeshop wearables grants! That means we need YOUR vote!! There’s only one week to vote – it will only take 2 seconds of your time. Click this link: http://makeshop.pghvoicesofyouth.org/vote-2000 and vote for INVENT-A-BLING!
If we win, we get 2,000$ to design and assemble wearables kits for young girls (think Klutz kits, with more technical components) to foster an interest in art and engineering.

Invent-a-bling, “invent your own bling”, is a wearable construction kit targeted at children ages 5-15. The majority of electronic/robotic construction kits are marketed for young boys, making it difficult for young girls to get excited about technologies and toys that could have a great impact on their education. Even if girls might be interested in the contents of these kits, the branding and advertising makes it less likely that a girl will play with it. The Invent-a-bling kit combines smart materials and embedded electronics geared towards wearable crafts, hoping to attract girls to the possibility of incorporating these technologies into their creations. We hope that this kit will attract children with a wider range of personalities and interests than the products that are currently available.

Social Industrial Robotics

Zack — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:08:09 +0000

________________________________________________________________________________________

:::: PROCESS ::::

Assembled head

Mold failure

Hardware components

Installing the massage head

Integrated hardware

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References:

Hyung-Kew Lee; Sun-Il Chang; Euisik Yoon (2009). Dual-Mode Capacitive Proximity Sensor for Robot Application: Implementation of Tactile and Proximity Sensing Capability on a Single Polymer Platform Using Shared Electrodes. Sensors Journal, IEEE, volume 9, issue 12, pp 1748-1755.

Carroll Chris. (Aug 2011). Us. And Them. National Geographic 220. Â2 : 66-68,70,72-73,75-78,80-82,84-85.

Chih-Hung King,Tiffany L. Chen, Advait Jain, and Charles C. Kemp (2010). Towards an Assistive Robot that Autonomously Performs Bed Baths for Patient Hygiene. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). http://www.hsi.gatech.edu/hrl/clean-iros10.shtml

Guizzo, Erico(May 10, 2010). Robots With Knives: A Study of Soft-Tissue Injury in Robotics. Retrieved from http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/050610-robots-with-knives-a-study-of-soft-tissue-injury-in-robotics

Algo.Rhythm: programmable drum robots kits

Huaishu — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 19:45:58 +0000

Algo.Rhythm is a set of drum robots with programmable behavior. Each drum robot records pattern of beats when knocked on, and replays the rhythm by hitting its neighbor robot with a pre-programmed twist. Arrange the kit to compose algorithm based drumming performance, and learn computational concepts like sequential execution, loop, and forking through improvising.

Click here for more information

CoDe lab student at the Children’s Museum Makeshop

derthere — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:07:25 +0000

Deren Guler an mTID student at the CoDe lab recently completed a 3 week FINE Art Residency at the Children’s Museum in Pittsburgh on the subject of activating origami. She worked with kids and adults of all ages to create interactive and robotic paper sculptures. IMG_0210 IMG_0232

CoDe Lab student and alumni team launch Piccolo CNC at TEI-2012

Mark D Gross — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 13:36:31 +0000

CoDe Lab MTID student Huaishu (Nuno, Bill) Peng and a team of CoDe Lab alumni (Cheng Xu, Tiago Rorke, and Greg Saul) designed a DIY low-cost pocket-sized (if you have big pockets) CNC platform. Their project, Piccolo, launches at the Tangible Embedded, Embodied Interaction conference in Kingston, Ontario this week.

Talk at CSCW 2012 conference

Yen-Chia Hsu — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:18:25 +0000

Yen-Chia Hsu gave a talk at CSCW 2012 conference, February 11-15 in Bellevue. Please refer to SynTag for more information.

The Posture Suspenders featured on several international sites

Tobias Sonne — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:27:00 +0000

The Posture Suspenders, a project which Tobias Sonne worked on while at The CMU Code Lab in the Fall semester as a visiting scholar, from Aarhus University, Denmark, just got featured on several blogs.
The Posture Suspenders is one of his several projects on workplace healthy-habits. The Posture Suspenders senses posture in real-time and via vibration alerts the user to bad posture, and thereby the user develops muscle memory for correct posture. Read more about the Posture Suspenders at http://code.arc.cmu.edu/projects/the-posture-suspenders/ .

Below, several sites have picked up the project:

http://www.fashioningtech.com/ (English)

http://blog.makezine.com/ (English)

http://www.designtaxi.com/ (English)

http://dvice.com/(English)

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/posture-suspenders (English)

http://www.techewire.com/2012/01/electronic-suspenders-enough-said/ (English)

http://www.theverge.com/ (English)

http://www.craziestgadgets.com/ (English)

http://www.thefabweb.com/ (English)

http://www.nextgadgets.net/ (English)

http://www.athenna.com/ (English)