There have been a few reasons for that. Getting ready for the start of term, four research students in various stages of writing up (two now handed in, two to go in the next two months!), a plethora of grant deadlines - organising accreditation from the IED for our Product Design programme, visitors from the Ukraine, Georgia and Uzbekistan as part of the Engitech project... the back end of summer has been a busy, busy time! Well, at least it's interesting stuff. It might have been
And of course, a certain videogame has been released in the last month - you might have noticed.
I am referring, of course, to 22cans' "Godus" (why, was there another big videogame release in the last month? ;o)). I backed it through Kickstarter, and I've already had my money's worth, I can say. For someone who lost an unholy amount of their youth to Populous 2, the game is certainly compulsive! My excuse, of course, is that it's in Beta at the moment. 22cans need me!
Anyway, that's been sucking up a lot of the free time that I might otherwise have used to keep writing the blog (sorry). That, and I've been building a manipulandum out of Lego, cheap force sensors and a couple of National Instruments' MyDAQs (it's pretty swish - I'll post more about it in due course). I haven't even unpacked my Raspberry Pi camera module yet, despite having had it three weeks!
So, I'll be back with more information on my early adventures in inclusive play with the K005 project soon, and more of the output from the Together Through Play project (now in its closing stages!) - which the K005 stuff was meant to be a preamble to! And somewhere amongst that, I'm going to get all the formatting on this blog sorted out, and my LinkedIn and ResearchGate profiles and... well. We'll see.
But just to prove that I've been doing productive stuff with my time, feast your eyes on these pics:
It's a manipulandum - originally proposed by Johansson and Westling (1984) as a way of measuring fingertip forces during manipulation tasks. This one isn't intended for experimental use (it's made of Lego, after all!): rather, it's a concept demonstrator for testing the Honeywell force sensors I've been using. They're pretty good, actually - and at £50 each, pretty reasonably priced, and very compact compared to those you might spend a few hundred or thousand pounds on. My hope is that this will be the basis of small fleet of devices we can deploy in our school-based projects. Not made of Lego, obviously - Lego structures are just a bit too prone to exploding when too much force is applied (though, in fairness, they're easy to repair, so maybe Lego kit isn't quite as crazy as it sounds!). But this is a concept demonstrator. The one shown here is the early prototype: it'll measure finger and thumb forces (which will be roughly equal and opposite in a straight lift). The version I'm currently working on will do thumb, forefinger and middle finger forces, as well as measuring the vertical load force.
But that's a tale for another time!
References
Westling, G. & Johansson, R. S. (1984). Factors influencing the force control during precision grip. Experimental Brain Research, 53, 277-284
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