For my final project in Parsons D&T bootcamp, I created a site called fattofatto.org that was designed to promote the sport of bocce in New York City. I have a real love for the game, so this was a fun project, especially making mini-documentaries by interviewing other players and building a game based bocce's basic skills. Fatto!

Welcome to the Alien Pet Shop! ATP is a game that teachers designers and other professionals the basics of interactive programming. The player is the chief mechanic at a shop that sells very unusual pets. The game guides the player along to handling increasingly complex orders and customizing the wackiest animals for sale in the galaxy!

Alien Pet Shop is a game that allows players to assume the role of a mechanic. This is the machine that the mechanic must build and extend. Orders of different kinds come in here, then are processed by a program that the player writes themselves.

In Alien Pet Shop, players have to alter the guts of the ordering machine to accommodate customer requests. This is a simple example of what the interface would look like. By using simple tools, the player learns the basics of programming.

This is the proposed code editor for the Alien Pet Shop project. It features a graphical as well as textual interface for writing code. Using multiple syntaxes will hopefully lead to an increase in understanding.

Lots of good progress today on the haptics project. Cicek covers the "heartbeat" and "shotgun" assignments, complete with video.

The heartbeat is fairly straightforward. The Arduino kicks out two 50ms bursts of the vibrators motors separated by 10ms, followed by a 500ms pause. The second burst is at 75 percent of the duty cycle coming off the PWM. It's eerily effective.

The shooter took us a while to perfect, but I think we've got a good one. The best way to see what we've done with it is to check the source code (attached below,) but the gist of it is that we start off with a heavy vibration from both the mini-vibrating motor (in the grip) and our custom-built macro-vibrating motor. The latter is a generic DC motor with an offset weight hot-glued to the shaft contained inside the top of an old spray can and attached to the area where the "bolt" would be on a rifle. Then we added another pulse from another mini located downrange on the barrel. By tweaking the timings, you get a fairly good sense of the gun kicking when you hit the cute red trigger.

As Inti Einhorn mentioned in his presentation (which was great, man--I've had several conversations based on it in just the past couple of days,) getting the Wii to work requires training. That'll be true of anything we build, too, especially w/r/t anything gestural.

With that in mind, I would strongly recommend that we look into neural networks as a way to train the machines. It sounds a little intimidating, but it really isn't. In fact, it ties in very closely to the reading about logic gates we've been doing so far.

IBM has a pretty good introduction to NN. In particular, read Threshold logic units (TLUs) and How a TLU Learns. The rest is pretty math heavy--though it's still good reading, if you're up for it. You can recreate AND, OR, XOR, etc. gates using neural networks pretty easily.

Hot on the heels of our readings in class are two unconventional examples of how logic gates work.