Our first week in the course. Here are some brief notes. **

Tuesday:

Introduced the course by going through the course profile.
Handed out the toolboxes with arduinos, breadboard, multimeters, servo motors, and some simple tools.
Pulled apart some gadgets which everyone had brought in. Looked at the components inside and discussed what the functions might be.
Tried to get the Arduinos hooked up and running, but we ran out of time, so I asked the students to do this before the next class.

Friday:

Started by checking that everyone’s arduino was working. There were some problems with the drivers for the serial port for a couple of people, but we managed to get that working. Also, need to check that Nano board is selected with Atmega168 rather than Atmega328.
Described the pins on the nano board and showed how to attach a servo motor.
Played around with the example servo sweep program, tried different values in the loops to make the servo move at different speeds.
Went down to the e-lab and collected some components (potentiometers, hook-up wire, and resistors).
Added a potentiometer and pull-down resistor to the circuit and used the example servo knob program so we could control the position of the servo by turning the knob.
Used Serial.println commands to look at what values were being read from the potentiometer and adjust the program.
Used character-movement tinkering cards to choose a movement and character to design for.

**Task for next Tuesday: ** With the character and movement cards your group chose, try to tinker a kinetic sculpture driven by the servo motor that moves in a way that expresses those qualities. For example, if your words were ‘fierce leaping’ you need to create a sculpture that somehow leaps in a fierce way.

See Ben Hopson’s kinetic work for lots of ideas for how to create interesting movements out of very simple materials.