Physical Prototyping: Materials & Electronics

Purpose

We wanted to provide a tangible demonstration of our interactive design to help our audience better visualize how it would look in real life.

Considerations

Materials

• Wood to fit the natural look and feel of a garden
• Clear acrylic to simulate an interactive touch surface
• Metal screws, washers, & nuts to hold the wood and acrylic together & also allow for easy disassembly

Electronics

• Arduino: provide programming functionality
• 9V battery or 9V 1A DC wall adapter
• LEDs flashing/pulsing to serve as simple indicators and/or servo motor to catch attention with movement, as LEDs are hard to see in broad daylight.
• Processing (some type of onClick() or buttonPress() function) or a prototyped “phone” with a physical button located to pretend that a task has been assigned.