“The goal of this project is to find an original and intuitive way to control a digital robotic arm made with the Processing program, using components that are compatible with Arduino. This consists of 5 different parts differentiated by colors. The first and the fourth can rotate (in both directions) up to 360 degrees and the others only up to 120 degrees.
In order to test its functionality, a game was designed in which the last piece of the robot has to touch a red ball, that changes its position as each game is completed. All this was initially controlled from the computer keys, but we had to find another way to meet the proposed objective.
That is why we have designed a prototype in which, by selecting each piece through pushpins that are connected to a circle of conductive paint, we can determine the position of each of them, by rotating a 3D piece with another pushpin on top of the paint.
The first thing that came to our minds was to make something tactile, but without the use of screens. That’s why we investigated the different options we could use and discovered conductive paints. For this, we were inspired by the projects shown in the images, from which we came up with the idea of making a potentiometer from the paint, to control the angle of rotation of the pieces.
To control which piece we selected, we were inspired by the functioning of Makey Makey, which is based on different ways of creating open circuits that, when you touch them, being us ground, the circuit closes and the action is executed. However, we came up against the problem that everyone conducts current differently, so we had to standardize the contact between components with pushpins.”