Augmented Sensor Simulation : Crafting Material Interfaces

By Daekwon Park

This project is essentially a research conducted as a precursor to the final project. I am planning on creating a modular smart system consisted of elastic material, sensors and actuations for the final project and due to the complexity and limited budget, digital simulation will play a big role during the design process. Thus, studying the feasible method of bridging the sensors with the digital representation in real-time simulation was the main objective of my sensor project.

Firefly is a tool created by Andy Payne and Jason Kelly Johnson in order to connect Grasshopper (a free plug-in for the popular CAD software, Rhino) with Arduino micro-controller. One of the greatest strength of this tool is the fact that it is integrated with 3D CAD software environment which enables simulating and visualizing complex 3 dimensional geometries.

A flex sensor and a photocell sensor were tested to see how effectively Firefly can bridge between the preliminary designed geometry and the micro-controller. The geometry was built using Grasshopper and Rhino, as a parametric/ generative model. The sensor data that flows into the Firefly components are converted using ReMap component and Smooth component in order to manipulate the parameters of the geometry.

Demonstration Video