Bed Data project is something that we had been thinking about. I think we come up with the idea in summer 2009. Idea of visualizing sleep and sex sounds fun.
During summer we start building our force sensors. We were thinking about using 96 FSRs. That was so expensive so we build our own. Also we prepared a very nice documentation for DIY FSR (http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-FSR-sandwich/)
Then next step was setting up a multiplexer shield.Our first iteration, we made a nice multiplexer shield for Arduino. It seems very cool.
However, we had some issues with multiplexers, then we decided to stick with breadboard.
Breadboard with multiplexer
For analog multiplexers (CD 4067) Tom Igoe has really good documentation on ITP physical computing page. Also,, I am planing to make an instructable for using multiple analog multiplexers.
Then we connected our sensors. We used ribbon cables (8wires) and terminals. So, we connected our sensors to terminals and terminal are connected to ribbon cables and they are connected to multiplexers. I think this is very modular setup and helped us a lot.
Then we tried to program our sensors. We are reading all the values by using Arduino Duemilanove. Then we are sending everything to processing. We have 3 different setup after this.
My program
I got all the sensor values, and but all the sensor into an order. First, I ran 20 loops to average sensor values. That helped me to remove the noise from sensors. In my code, for each run, I was looking at difference between this average value and sensor value and getting their difference according to a threshold. So, I had precise values.
Sensor values are changing their rectangular visuals color, white to black. Then I blur the image and and re size it.This helped me to map sensor values to pixels. Then I run blob tracking.
my blobs
Diego Rioja‘s program
He visualized each sensor as circles, circles are getting larger or smaller according to sensor values.
Diegos Circles
Matt Richard’s Snake Game
Matt joined us in last minute. After talking with him for few hours, we decided to make a snake game. User need to roll his/her body up and down, left and right in the bed, to control the snake game. We projected the game to the ceiling, so user can watch it when he/she is laying down.
Matts game