Piggy bank
October 2009
This project was done in two days and a half as part of the Experience prototyping course we are having at the Umeå Institute of Design. During five weeks we are using different tools and techniques to prototype different stuff.
In the third week we decided to work on a modern version of a piggy bank. This piggy bank is alive and gets hungry, it is more like a pet, so you have to take care of it and feed it with money using your credit card whenever it gets hungry.
—
Wang Chao, Maggie Kuo and Jordi Parra
This box contains all the hardware we used: an Arduino BT, a push button to detect when the credit card is placed in the card slot and an iphone hidden behind a laser cut pattern used to display the eyes of the pet.
Behaviour
The piggy bank itself is alive and randomly gets sad when is moved or when it senses that somebody is around. It calls your attention and to make it feel better, its owner has to feed it with a small random amount of money that will be taken from the credit card.
The idea is that the owner has to take care of it, but at the same time, it saves money in a separate savings account. This way it still keeps the "surprise factor" because you don't know how much you have saved.
Sad and hungry
When you move it or it senses you around, it randomly becomes hungry so you have to feed it.
Full and happy
When the owner gives it some money, it gets happy and it celebrates it for a while.
Back to sleep
After eating, as most of the pets, it takes a nap until the next time it will feel it wants something to eat.
The components
Since building our own electronic components was not possible, we used an iphone instead. But connecting buttons directly to it is not possible. To solve that we used an Arduino to detect if the button was pressed or not. This input is sent to a computer in the room via Bluetooth and the computer sends this information back to the iPhone using the Wi-Fi network. When we feed the piggy bank, the iPhone knows we put the credit card in its slot and when we move it around we know it using the accelerometers of the iPhone.
For connecting the Arduino to the iPhone we used NADA mobile and built a quite simple Dashcode project with animated gifs that change randomly and when somebody interacts with the object. Tellart organized the course and Brian Hinch and Matt Cottam had a lot of patience giving us a crash course in Dashcode.
Watch how it works!
This video report shows how we built it and a demonstration of how it works. It was a really intense project, but the fun we had made it worth it.
If you like hardware sketches and still want more, you can have a look at the other things I have been building during the past weeks of this course in my Experience prototyping album on Vimeo.