group 5 blog

Today finally came, at last we got to build everything together. Today when we were going to build everything everyone were so glad and had a positive attitude, but we had some problems whit the standing that the punching bag is hanging to. The thing was that we thought that the floor was totally flat, but it wasnt. So we had an idea that we could lay some “Metro” newspapers underneath it so that it would stabilize. I’m so glad it worked and I hope it will hold these two days whit people smashing and hitting it.

But when we solved that problem another one encountered, this is when the stress probably started. Something happened whit the Arduino, the values that we got started randomly even without punching the bag. But after 1 hour or so, Anders and Samuel realized that could be something whit the electricity. It was something whit the electricity but the Arduino still made some weird randomly values; somehow it stopped as quickly as it came. So whit only 30 mins left in the exhibition hall and we still had to test it a little. We tested it and it worked and got the computer screen and the sound at the right place. But everything went out alright and im happy whit the result and I really hope that the project leaders think so too.

Marcus Melin

Today we put all things together on spot. Karlskrona-students arrived yesterday and today we are getting to know them better as we fix our exhibition. We out black cloth from the ceiling, experimenting with lights and split the area for our projects.

People are pretty excited. Both fun to really get how things will appear, especially your own device, and to let go of things that you might wanted for your project but time set the limit. So we´re doing our best with what we got and are happy with that. Some coders have a lot to do, though. They could still improve their project until tomorrow, even if everything else is set.

I´m on my way to the exhibition floor to meet the others. We will throw some punches there and maybe give nicolai a sweet massage, while he codes a high score function for our game. See you there!

/sam

I’ve been really excited the past 2 days. Yesterday we finished building everything, and we had a little gaming session with our classmates. I can tell this is going to be a hit! It was so cool and im really looking forward to officially presenting Punchline at the exhibition and show the others what we accomplished.

It has all started to sink in the past week, it doesnt really matter if the other prototypes are big hit and go to London. Its really mindblowing to know that nothing of this even existed in our minds only 3 weeks ago, and now we have a fully functioning thing that we’ve built ourselves, i couldnt begin to imagine this is what I’d be doing.  Im so impressed with what everybody has done, almost all of the technologys that have been used where foreign to me a few weeks ago.

Today we are carrying everything down to the exhibition room, and putting all the screws and wires in place, I don’t think we are going to have any problems with it. The flash has been acting up a bit lately but Iäm sure Nicolai is going to get it under control. Aslong as we have all our “must haves” im more than satisfied.

he blogging schedule has been a little “off”,but atleast my reason is that im so unbelievably excited about our project! I’ve had trouble finding the right word to describe everything so the blogging has been low priority.

It feels like everything is functioning now and that its time to tie up the bag and go on to “pimping” it up. The highscore has been a pain in the neck, but Im sure Nicolai is going to figure it out. Marcus finished the stand before the weekend which is super sweet, but at the same time really annoying because i want to get cracking and work on it together with the bag and our pretty details. But i guess i have to be patient untill next week.

I’ve been working alot with Anders on the graphics this week. And i’ve helped marcus find quotes that we can record for the game.  I was also assigned to “gangster up” and go spraypaint our bag with out logo, but unfortunaly that ended in failure. I dont know if its me that has no spraypainting skills or the bag that was the wrong meterial or the paint that was’nt up to the challenge, but we decided to buy some “plastic/sticker” paper and just cut out the logo and put on the bag. Its probably going to work better.

Jade Borday

Our projekt came to a stage where we don’t have a lot to do until some things are ready. Marcus is building the punchbag-stand with his daddy. The others are designing the punching bag itself and I’m trying to code the game. After hours of coding this gets a little bit boring and I’m using every opportunity to walk around and sneak over their shoulders. I have to say this module is really interesting.

NICOLAI

We are also done with the sketches for our stand, and almost done with our visual layout for the setup.

Anders

This is our punching bag!

game in progress-screen

highscore-screen

idle-screen when nobody is playing

Friday night we finally got our sound-sensors working. They now respond as they should, and they detect vibration in a scale from 0 to 1200 and then transfer the result to our flash application. From now on its time to finish our game-concept and to build some kind of stand for our punching-bag. The stand should be solid, but not too big. Preferably is should also include some sort of visual projection, eg. a flat screen tv. 

Anyway, here’s some action shots from the past week!

Anders

The Arduino board

Our sound sensors now respond to vibration

Nicolai and Anders working with Arduino and Flash

It has been an eventfull day, after lunch we came up with a completely new idea, and were running with it and developing the concept. OK, so the idea is: we have apunching bag, we connect sensors to it and hang it up, and it becomes a game, the sensors measure how fast/hard you punch and there are pre-recorded comments so if you suck you get “Is that all you got?” or something like that and than you get compliments if you are a good fighter, you also get scores according to your fighting skills.

I feel very pealsed with this idea, it seem very do-able, but more importanly its seems mor fun than the previous idea, that i gave up on pretty early on. We whent and got some things for this new project today, but unfortunatly it was the wrong stuff so Marcus is going back tomorrow by himself so we don’t get behind our schedule. We had a meeting today and we made a plan and set up deadlines.

We had a less interesting workshop today. I dont feel i got anything out of it since i’m not responsibly for the tech part. It have been much more effective if we hade hade this time to work on other things in the project. Especially since migrains sent half of the group home early. Other than that it look promising, we are now equally enthusiastic to the project and that is going to rub off on our prototype.

Jade Borday