Week 4
Feedback from last week
Last week, I acquired two inflatable pillows with different designs, begun connecting the Programmable Air, investigated the software control of Programmable Air while realizing its Nano board does not allow Wi-Fi connections, migrated the Arduino program and the website to Arduino IO instead of Liveblocks/WebSockets, and improved the visual design of the website. I asked:
- How do I move forward with sending commands to Programmable-Air wirelessly?
- Are these pillows a good fit aesthetically/physically?
- How do I connect the Programmable-Air physically to the pillows?
I got some helpful suggestions, including:
- My friend David suggested using serial communication from the Arduino
- Jonathan helped me prototype connecting the Programmable-Air tubing the pillow by wrapping the tubing in a thin balloon to make a better seal
- Daniel helped me think through software/hardware Programmable-Air approaches, plus advice on adapting the tubing to the pillows
Pillows
My two neck pillows arrived from Amazon, the wrap-around design as well as classic fleece-covered airline-oxygen-mask-style bag. The difficulty revealed by using them is the port sizes, which require some kind of adapter from the tubing to the port sizes. Daniel suggested 3D printing an adapter with TPU, which is firmly outside my area of expertise, but something to investigate shortly.
Programmable-Air future
Thus far, I assumed using Programmable-Air was my only path to inflating the neck pillow, but its exact technical construction, using an Arduino Nano that’s not Wi-Fi-compatible, meant I have several options, all more complex than I was hoping:
- Use serial communication to run networking on the 33 Nano IoT and send direct commands over a wire to the Programmable-Air Nano (3 pieces of software, 3 pieces of hardware—complex)
- Adapt the Programmable-Air firmware to the 33 Nano IoT chipset (yikes!)
- Take the VR out of this project, drop the Wi-Fi requirement, and send commands straight from a laptop over serial to the Programmable-Air Nano (sad)
On the ITP floor, Angel overheard me discussing the project, and recommended skipping Programmable-Air altogether to use an air pump directly from my Arduino. I bought from Adafruit:
- 2 Air Pumps
- 2 Air Valves
- 1m Silicone Tubing
Adafruit made a demo video demonstrating how these components fit together. Unlike the Programmable-Air, these pumps don’t have a pressure sensor that would allow inflating to certain percentages. But in thinking through the project, I believe I can use certain time durations of inflation/non-inflation kicked off at the right points to get the effect I’m looking for. The parts are expected to arrive later this week.