Thursday 26 April 2012

Full Size Teddy Bear Models

Now that the wires have arrived, I just need to implement the following;

1. longer wires for contacts & LED
2. button contacts on the wires
3. edit the audio on the mp3 player
4. insert all wiring into the teddy bears

Once this is complete i can do a focus group and other types of prototype evaluation as mentioned before in my weekly goals.

The first thing i did was strip down the ends of the wires. I then soldered the buttons onto the ends of the wires as well as soldering long wires onto an LED to use as an indicator light.



I then tested the original xbee circuits to check that they were working correctly. They suddenly are very buggy. Below is my schematic:


I was experiencing some bugs with the circuit last time and when i turned it on again today it didn't work at all. I re-posted to the arduino forums as someone had mentioned the possibility that the mp3 player was interfering with the arduino's whole power supply. After doing this i realised that i'd been following advice that the things connected to the relay had to share a common ground with the arduino. This was what was causing the problems. So i decided to see if i could get it to work without having them share a common ground and moved a single wire across. 

It worked! I posted my solution to the arduino forum in case anyone else wanted to learn from my mistakes. http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,102291.0.html

New fritzing diagram.

Building the wiring into the bear:

The metal contacts for use in the hands are extremely conductive and work perfectly. There is debounce code on them with is useful. The LED on long wires had to be re-soldered because the little fragments of wire didn't come together as they should have.

The next step was to insert the components into the bear. I planned on leaving the bulk of the circuitry outside of the bear until testing was complete, which is why i needed extra long wires. I pierced small holes in the fabric using a seam ripper as well as small rips in the seam so i could get my hand in to manipulate the wiring. I also insulated the LED wires using teddy bear stuffing to stop it short-circuiting.




Above is the bear all wired up. Notice the contacts in the palm of its hands. The green led is the heart area, and i will possibly put an actual heart logo there. 

I may also put hearts in the palms of their hands.

Next i need to work on preparation for target user evaluation, and do predictive and heuristic evaluation of the prototype.

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