Waldo the Treasure Guarding Dragon

My design for the ITTT project was a dragon perching in long grass guarding his chest of coins. While you are a good few cm away from him, he won't do anything. Yet as soon as you try to come close he will let you know he isn't welcoming you to come any closer.

While you are too close to his treasure he will flap his wings in anger. The horns attop his head will light up dangerously. And when you don't leave quick enough he will start growling at you, trying to scare you away with a voice that sounds misplaced with a friendly looking dragon like Waldo.

1 Ultrasonic Senor

2 LED red

1 Resistor 220ohm

20 Jumper wires

1 Arduino Uno

1 Power cable

2 Servos Filec micro servo 9g FS90

1 Cartboard box

Smaller Cartboard box

Tin

Iron Wire 2mm thick with rubber protection

Thread green + Purple

40 - 50 cms of green fabric

10 - 20 cms of purple fabric

Glue

Tape

Soldering Iron

Insulation tape

PCB

Pliers

Laptop

Scissors

Stanley Knife

Colored paper (Brown, Black, Dark green, Purple)

App Kyaa_SerialComm_UI.exe / Adafruit MP3 Music Maker Shield

The first concept I came up with was just a dragon that could move.

When presenting this idea to my teacher (Johan) he told me it was a bit simple but that if I made it a bit more interesting and interactful then it would be a much better project.

So I decided to think on ways to make the way the dragon behaves towards you more prominent. Some parts were sadly scrapped because of the time or difficulty level. The most important things stuck though and I tried to make them preform as well as I could.

The first was that the wings could move around. This would imply that Waldo is trying to look more threathening than he really is by pretending to be taller and bigger.

Secondly He would growl to let you know that he was not having you get any closer. This however had its own annoyances and frustration that I will explain later.

Lastly Waldo was supposed to lay down on the treasure, but stand up when you got close. A servo would support him and make him stand on his own. I decided to change this at the end. I thought it would be more interesting to see what was actually in the treasure chest so the viewer would want to touch the gold that would be in it.

When I had the main concepts of what I needed to be done lined up I could start on working on the project itself.

As I've never used arduino before I thought it would be a good idea to get some help from different tutorials.

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These were all very well explained and with the other things I could remember about during physics lessons were easy to follow through.

I tried combining them on my own and it worked! Though the code wasn't worded efficiently.
I went to my boyfriend, who is studying software engineering, for some advice on how I could make it easier to follow and a bit less messy.

He looked at my code and immediately went to a website named Tinkercat. Here he was able to easily test the hardware without having to actually build the hardware.

At first I gathered all specific codes for the different parts in multiple aspects of what Waldo was going to be. For example, I followed a tutorial on how to use a ultrasensor and combined this with what I learned about LEDs.

Because of this the code was a bit messy. I looked it over a few more times, with the help of some and got it quite neat.

For what the program does:

When someone is within 21cm of Waldo the function "Activitate" will play and one of the servos will continually turn 180 degrees then reset to 0. The other will turn 150 degrees and then stay there.

When you're standing within the boundaries set, a "P" will appear in a tiny window, this will trigger an selected .wav file playing a growling noise. When you are further away from Waldo a "S" will be send to the window telling the application to not play anything. This is also the Deactivate function in de code. When this is triggered everything will be reset to the beginning until you come too close again.

The application that sends out either a "P" or a "S" was made by my boyfriend as my adafruit mp3 shield music maker failed to function. The code I looked through to test the mp3 shield all didn't work for different reasons I will explain later. The fact that the application does the same thing but in a different way was nice to understand.

When I was working on my code I will admit that I'd been pushing the mp3 shield back a bit. When I finally came around to it and ran a test file it got quite a few errors that shouldn't have been there.

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-music-maker-sh...

I looked up the shield and it had an entire page on what to do. The first problem started with the sd cart that was said not to be present. unplugged and replugged the power cable and it didn't mention it again. Than the next problem arrised that I had to change some code, or the device wouldn't have worked properly. When you change the code he would say he played the song while you didn't hear anything and when you did not change the code he would say that the file couldn't be opened. Eventually I got so confused I tried to ask some help from others, but the results were always the same. Either the file "played" or he wouldn't be able to open it.

Disclaimer, the speaker did not break. Everytime you started the program you would hear a small noise that indicated the speaker worked.

In the end I decided that a different approach might be better.

I firstly made a drawing of where everything was going to be connected to. This way I wouldn't be able to make any mistakes as to where what goes.

Soldering was interesting in a way I was happy to get to know. Though my tin didn't melt well eventhough my soldering iron was 450 degrees celcius.

With something clearly not as it belongs I made sure only to do the necessary soldering. I cut a square out of the PCB. Here on I made a positive side and a negative side using coper from smaller jumper wires. I made certain nothing was touching eachother. Next were the lights. These took the longest most likelijk as they didn't need a PCB.

Afterwards I cut another smaller square and used this one for the ultra-sensor. I found this one very challenging as the pins were so very close to eachother and they weren't allowed to touch. Thankfully everything turned out okay in the end.

The dragon Waldo started with iron wire. These were interesting to try out as I had never used them before.

It was occasionally challenging to tie ends to eachother and make it look good in a whole piece.

Next was the fabric. I, personally, really like green for dragons, so that was the color I went for. I tried to stuff him with poleyther but it didn't fit that well so I eventually took it out.

Then I tried to get all the cables inside the body of the dragon. The ultra-sensor that were originally planned to be his nose ended up becomming his eyes, just because it looked irresistibly cute. The lights that were now his horns intstead of eyes, were a whole lot more difficult to get straight than the ultra-sensor, who you could just click in space.

I had to redo some of my soldering because of the low quality cables that broke when I tried to put them inside the dragon.

When all the cables were neatly tied together and strapped against the skeleton of the dragon, I stiched up Waldo. He got green skin with some pressure buds to hold the skin in place.

His wings are made of purple paper so they would be light enough to carry.

The cables go through the legs of Waldo into the box he was standing on, with, the arduino and the second servo inside. This box is decorated to look like a block of dirt

I wanted Waldo to guard something with actual meaning, so I put my collection of global coin collection.

I really like to collect them.

Though I said before that I learned quite a bit I'll summarize it here.

The things I've learned from ITTT:

Soldering.

I also learned how to make a body frame out of iron wire.

How to code arduino. Before the project If This Then That I had never once used any of the electronics we had to use. I really enjoyed being able to use them and especially as an interaction designer will be using the skills I've learned from this project in later projects. And hopefully with the helpful feedback I've been given at the presentation, I'll be able to include the lacking parts as well.