Created by: unstable.design Shanel Wu, Laura Devendorf, Emma Goodwill
- Fabric
- Padding
- ESP32 (ESP)
- Tablet
- Programming Cable (USB to MicroUSB)
- Power Cable
a. Download the [Arduino IDE] (https://www.arduino.cc/en/software)
b. Install the ESP 32 Board via the Board Manager. Instructions at ESP Core
(Optional) If you need to change the files running on the service, you can update them in the "data" folder but must follow the instructions here:
Download ESPServer_WS_Fabric.ino and open it in the Arduino IDE. Change SSID and password at the top of the file to your Wi-Fi network's information. The network must run on 2.4GHz (Wi-Fi 4) to be compatible with the ESP. The network also needs to use WEP or WPA/WPA2 Personal encryption (NOT WPA Enterprise). We recommend assigning a static IP to the ESP.
3. Continue Installation instructions at Step 4.
You can find a video demo of the fabric and visualizer on YouTube;
The user interface client will run on the browser on your local machine. We reccomend using Google Chrome. The UI updates the visualization based on the information it receives from the ESP and writes that information to the browser's Local Storage. You can view the local storage used by opening the Chrome Code Inspector, clicking "Application", and then "Local Storage." This data is used to show the history of interactions with the fabric and will be preserved even if Chrome is closed. An explanation of the user interface features can be found here.
If you would like to make changes to the UI, please do so in the ui.js
file.
If you would like to make any changes to the way data is logged, you can do so in log.js
. The log contains some helper functions for clearing and recording the data. Since the local storage can store only 5MB of data (or 650,000 data entries) we have written functions for you to both clear the data (which you should do carefully) or download the data to a local file. Once the log is full, the software will simply delete and overwrite the oldest entry in the log.
To have any changes to these files take effect, you need to install the ESP33 filesystem uploader tool. Both the ui.js
and log.js
are in the data
subdirectory of the ESPServer_WS_Fabric.ino
sketch, which is what the Arduino IDE will flash to the ESP's memory.
Opening the Chrome console and typing the following functions will allow you to clear and download accumulated data.
downloadLocalStorage()
downloads a CSV titled with the earliest and latest timestamp for collecting and preserving the data.
clearLocalStorage()
erases all data collected in local storage. This should really only be done on setup, as the visualization gets more interesting as more data accumulates.