Prototype
Prototype
Output:
Eventually, we decided that the output should be something printed on paper: we wanted the receiver to be able to keep the message physically; like when a person finds a message in a bottle. After searching online, we found a suitable output for our project: a "Thermal Printer".
After finding out that it was possible to program them with the help of Arduino, we ordered two in order to see how our topic would work with the minimal amount of printers.
It turns out that due to us only having two printers, we ended up heading into a direction where it was not about sending messages to random printers, but to have a conversation between 2 printers.
Input:
As for the input, we wanted to avoid having a keyboard to be able to write a message which would have led us to the question if it was even necessary to use thermal printers instead of social networks as a communication tool. We came up with an experiment of using 8 buttons to communicate. Each button represents a column in which the printer would print a square if the button is pressed.
This would allow the person to send words or short messages, patterns, morse codes even. Because we lack a screen which shows feedback to the sender what the receiver would see, we chose to have the results printed on both printers. That meant that if the sender presses a button, both printers would be printing. Yet that also means that if both ends were pressing on buttons, the result would be either chaos or collaboration. We were intrigued by that idea being very similar to a normal conversation, unlike chats and social media in general.
We wanted to see how this idea of dots/squares in a row could take us further and found an interesting video of maybe how we can use our concept to translate it into another languange.
Feedback Round II
After the feedback round, these few points would be how we are going to continue our project to fine tune our concept:
- Research on old technical stuff like morse codes, telegraphs
- Stock exchange: all of the people screaming simultaneously, inventing codes to communicate, ..
- Why would people use this as a communication tool?
After finding out that it was possible to program them with the help of Arduino, we ordered two in order to see how our topic would work with the minimal amount of printers.
It turns out that due to us only having two printers, we ended up heading into a direction where it was not about sending messages to random printers, but to have a conversation between 2 printers.
This would allow the person to send words or short messages, patterns, morse codes even. Because we lack a screen which shows feedback to the sender what the receiver would see, we chose to have the results printed on both printers. That meant that if the sender presses a button, both printers would be printing. Yet that also means that if both ends were pressing on buttons, the result would be either chaos or collaboration. We were intrigued by that idea being very similar to a normal conversation, unlike chats and social media in general.
We wanted to see how this idea of dots/squares in a row could take us further and found an interesting video of maybe how we can use our concept to translate it into another languange.