Planet Arduino

Trojan 77 is a gamified simulation of the Trojan virus running on Arduino Uno. The Trojan is a malware designed to provide unauthorised remote access to a user’s computer amongst other harmful possibilities and this prototype was designed to be exhibited at a technology museum to show the most important effects the virus. Inspired by the tilting labyrinth game, the prototype simulates a few key effects of the Trojan virus like passwords leaking out, files being deleted and culminating in a system crash.

Trojan 77  was created by a team of Physical Computing students (Dhrux Saxena, Gunes Kantaroglu, Liliana Lambriev, Karan Chaitanya Mudgal) at CIID:

The idea of designing something analog to explain a digital construct was an exciting challenge to undertake. The way that computer viruses operate can be very complicated and hard to explain without overloading people with detailed information. Making this information visual via animated projections helped to communicate the effects in a fun and memorable way.

The Trojan moved through several prototyping stages. Initially, the wooden structure was built, followed by the maze. The structure as a whole became functional with the addition of Arduino and Processing. Two servo motors controlled by a joystick enabled the tilt while the movement of the ball triggered distinct light sensors which in turn triggered events in a Processing sketch mapped onto the maze.

The students created also a great video documentary  to explain the project with a style inspired by the work  of Charles and Ray Eames:

Every year the students of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) attend the Physical Computing class as part of their curriculum.

Having a small delegation of the Arduino team teaching this class has become quite a ritual. This past March Ubi De Feo, Alice Pintus, and Lorenzo Romagnoli runned the two-weeks-long intensive class.

Teaching at CIID is great experience, since you are surrounded by incredibly motivated and curious students, that are doing everything possible to design amazing projects and prototypes.

The topic of this year was prototyping interactive installations for a Science Center that would explain in a playful and engaging way how a technology works. For most of the students this was the first experience with physical computing, but even in such short time they were able to build eight different prototypes. The projects explain in an interactive way the science behind computer viruses, allergies, video compression, machine learning, laser printing, digital music synthesis, binary numbers and neuroprosthetic.

In Explaining laser printing Victoria Hammel, Chelsey Wickmark, Ciaràn Duffy, Feild Craddock demonstrate how the laser printer works. By using 16 servomotors connected to an Arduino UNO to move a matrix of magnets they were able to attract iron filings and draw letters on paper.

In Troyan 77 Karan Chaitanya Mudgal, Liliana Lambriev, Gunes Kantaroglu, Dhruv Saxena visualize the effects of a Trojan Virus harming your computer. Connecting Processing to Arduino they were able to create an overlay projection on top of the maze representative of the effect of the viruses on a computer.

Sound Blocks by John Ferreira, Alejandra Molina and Andreas Refsgaard is an musical instrument that explain how to compose sounds combining multiple soundwaves. The prototype was built using Arduino as a midi controller for Ableton.

Selfie Plant is an interactive installation taking pictures of itself using Arduino Yún, Facebook Graph APIs and then uploads them to Facebook. It was developed by a group of students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design during “The secret life of objects” course held also by Arduino.cc team. The final prototype was placed in the exhibition of the school, to see the interaction of the audience with it and you can see the result on Facebook.

The Selfie Plant is an attempt to provoke some thoughts above genre of expression. The Selfie Plant expresses itself in the form of nice-looking selfies, which it clicks according to its mood, weather or occasion. It mimics human behaviour, by giving it’s best pose and adjusting the camera angle to take the perfect selfie.

In the documentation on Github you can find all the details of the project composed by an Arduino Yún, controlling 2 servo motors and adjusting the positions of the plant and the camera stick; a python script (facebook.py) which communicates with Facebook’s graph API to post the captured photos on plant’s Facebook profile. In addition you’ll need also a LED Matrix, a Bread Board and 5 Volt Battery.

Here’s a preview of the diagram: