Interactive installations often require electronics and ours is not an exception. One way to produce the needed electronics is to solder all your components onto experimental circuit boards. This means you have to create all the electrical circuits yourself using wire or solder. It’s a great way of making a quick prototype but the downside is that it often results in a chaotic mess that is hard to debug if something doesn’t work. When you’re making one prototype this is not a huge issue but when you’re mass producing the same board multiple times it can get very frustrating and slow you down considerably.

In order to make our lives easier we decided to design printed circuit boards. The first step is to create a schematic of your circuit. The schematic has nothing to do with the physical world but is just a drawing of how all the components should be connected in theory. To make this schematic we used the program ‘PCB Artist’.

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The result of our 4 design together was pretty chaotic. We started the assignment with our own workplace as inspiration, but it evolved into some kind of sewer pipeline world.

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For our first technical studies assignment we set ourself (Kees V. and Benji C.) the challenge to create a dice with which you can choose from 3 different modes e.g. 1 led or multiple leds light up and ‘binary mode’. We also made the output of the dice completely random by using time as a ranomizer.

read further for the code!

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We, Floor and Oswaldo made a  digital dice.  This was our first experience with Arduino and programming. The solding, connecting the wires to the arduino and the programming; it was all new to us.
First of all it took us a long time to make the ‘die’, but we think the result is very proper.

Then came the second part, the programming. This was the hardest part, because we did not know where to start. We started with a loop that constantly gave random numbers from 1 to 6. We experimented a little with the delay time. Then we used the switch. Here we encountered some problems, because we did not know how to do this. The dice kept doing the same thing (when the swith was on and when it was off), so we asked some help. Someone told us we had to use a ‘while’, but this was a bit to hard for us. Then we used ‘if’s’ and then it worked.
Our intention for the dice was that it constantly had to give random numbers from 1 to 6 (very fast), and that it had to give one random number when pressing the switch. The number displays for a few seconds, then there is a delay of 2s and then it starts over again giving random numbers.
When we asked some help, we got exactly the opposite of what we wanted. After some experimenting we managed to get the right result. We were very happy with our first Arduino experience.

Our assignment for this week was to built an electronic dice. We wanted to built it as realistic as possible, so we added some special features to make it look like a real dice.

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