7 min read

Occupational Therapists work with individuals to achieve increased participation in their desired occupations–be it in work, self-care, or leisure activities. The cross collaboration between OTs and the Maker community, a group of technology-based do-it-yourself hobbyists, is a space that has much potential, and should be explored further. In this blog post, we are going to explore one such collaboration: a “Weather Cube” case study.

The Weather Cube was originally built for individuals with severe learning difficulties in an environmental awareness group that experienced problems with their sensory integration (SI). If inefficient sensory processing is prevalent in an individual, this may result in sensory integration dysfunction.

The cube stimulates the user’s imagination, and increases understanding of weather. Discussions can be started around the different weather elements, and introduce stimuli. For example, a fan can give the impression of wind, or water can be dripped onto the service user’s hands to experience the feeling of wetness. The sound files and images of the cube can be changed to suit different individuals and groups.

Building the Weather Cube

Each side of the large foam Weather Cube is stenciled with different meteorological icons and is associated with relevant weather sounds. By turning the face of the cube, the user can hear sounds and associate them with images.

Each icon is assigned a unique sound file. As the cube is picked up, the sound file linked with the upward facing plane is wirelessly triggered. Inside of the Weather Cube is housed a Shrimp, which is a DIY circuit (see shrimping.it for further information).

Sourcing the Prototyping Materials

The hardware we sourced for the Weather Cube use what we call ‘Shrimping,’ a strategy for sourcing and openly documenting interactive physical computing kits we create to support UK learners. We call it Shrimping out of loyalty to our humble hometown of Morecambe, an area so famous for its shrimps that they named the soccer team after them!

Shrimping is based on sourcing, testing, and documenting the cheapest possible components and modules direct from the manufacturers and wholesalers who serve professional electronics engineers and integrators. After prototyping a project, we provide free, easy-to-follow build graphics, instructions, and sourcing information online enabling others to prepare their own project kits direct from wholesalers, and substantially below retail prices especially when purchased in volume. In this section we outline the benefits and problems of sourcing your own parts direct.

Make Circuits Like an Engineer

Wholesale component suppliers do not operate with the hobbyist in mind, but their products are incredibly cheap, and with just a bit of community-maintained documentation, can be used like Legos–brought together in different combinations to prototype and deploy in a variety of educational and entertaining devices.

Constructing devices on breadboards and stripboards helps makers develop substantial prototyping skills, and understand the pathway that professional device-inventors use. With these skills and materials you can personalize the circuit to meet your own specific needs, which is nearly impossible with a printed circuit board. Once complete, you can use their working circuits as a reference to move towards full-scale manufacturing of printed circuit boards.

However, for many people, the main benefit of this approach is price. For hobbyists, Shrimping makes it cost-effective to deploy large numbers of experimental projects. For classrooms and Hackspaces, it becomes feasible to donate the kits for learners to adopt and personalize, which would be prohibitive if using prefabricated microcontroller boards from hobbyist suppliers.

Shrimp vs. Arduino

The programs that run on the Arduino Uno microcontroller board will run on the Shrimp too. The Shrimp has the full set of input and output pins as an Uno meaning that makers can use the circuit to replicate the many thousands of community-documented Arduino projects. However, it is built from the bare minimum of components, making it roughly one tenth the cost of an official Arduino board.

In the Weather Cube, we decided to attach a Shrimp circuit to a Raspberry Pi. Relative to the Shrimp, the Raspberry Pi is more geared up for power and processor-heavy multimedia and desktop applications. For physical computing projects, a Pi always needs some kind of interfacing circuit to be attached, which can themselves be quite expensive. The Shrimp therefore has complementary strengths to the Raspberry Pi, with its low cost, ability to attach directly to sensors and actuators, it’s ability to run in low power, and to run software in real time.

The computing capabilities of an official Arduino board come from the ATMEGA328 chip at its center, and the Shrimp is essentially the same as the reference circuit from the manufacturer’s data sheet, laid out on a breadboard. Unfortunately, a special program, called an Arduino bootloader needs to be copied to an ATMEGA to make it possible to program it from the Arduino IDE. That means you can’t use wholesale ATMEGAs without an extra preparation step. Using online auction sites you can buy a chip with an Arduino bootloader already added, and once you already have an Arduino-compatible chip, you can use this to bootload more chips using a special Arduino Sketch called Optiloader.

Breakout Modules

In addition to the Shrimp on breadboard, we’ve used three breakout modules and another sensor component, a piezoelectric transducer.

The breakout modules needed are: a CP2102 USB to UART for wired programming and communication, a HC-06 module for wireless Bluetooth communication and an ADXL345 Accelerometer module for sensing the orientation of our wearable sensors. The codes CP2102, HC-06, and ADXL345 actually refer to small ‘surface mount’ components that have tiny connections intended to be mounted industrially onto printed circuit boards. These components cannot be inserted into a breadboard or connected to for easy prototyping. For this reason, various suppliers provide ‘breakout modules’ which make the connections available as large pins with 0.10 inch (2.54mm) separation, suitable for insertion into breadboard, or wiring with female header cables.

The components themselves are quite cheap, and breakout boards are fairly simple to engineer, ensuring that the prices remain low. This also means different suppliers end up making similar-looking breakout boards but with different pin sequences and labeling. Breakout boards have the same fundamental capabilities, because they ‘break out’ the same pins from the same component, so if you wire to the correctly labeled pins, changes to the layout should not normally make much difference.

One major exception, sadly, are the ‘transmit and receive pins’ on UART modules. Some UARTs label their pins according to their role – describing if they transmit TX or receive RX data. Others label their pins to describe what pins on the communicating device to attach to, so a transmitting pin is actually labeled RX, and a receiving pin, TX.

As you can see, there is a lot of potential for the Maker community to collaborate with health professionals (and others), to design projects for the greater good. Also, by sourcing wholesale prototyping materials, makers are able to cheaply test and document their projects, and invent personalized circuits. So, if you are a maker, we urge you to get out and partner with your community; your imagination is limitless.


About the authors

Clare Bowman enjoys hacking playful interactive installations and co-designing digitally fabricated consumer products. She has exhibited projects at Maker Faire UK, Victoria and Albert Museum, FutureEverything, and Curiosity Collective gallery shows. Some recent work includes “Sands Everything”, an interactive hourglass installation interpreting Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man soliloquy through gravity-controlled animated grains, and more.

Cefn Hoile sculpts open source hardware and software, and supports others doing the same. Drawing on 10 years of experience in R&D for a multinational technology company, he works as a public domain inventor, and an innovation catalyst and architect of bespoke digital installations and prototypes. He is a founder-member of the CuriosityCollective.org digital arts group, and a regular contributor to open source projects and not-for-profits. Cefn is currently completing a PhD in Digital Innovation at Highwire, University of Lancaster, UK.

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