The Aether platform is being trialled at the Tate Exchange. as part of the Digital Maker Collective’s open days during February and March.
This is the second of four sessions at the Tate Exchange. You can read about the first session here: Digital New and the Familiar.
A positive point from the session was that we had a working prototype with improvements made to the power supply.
The problems we encountered were due to an unreliable internet connection. Aether requires a consistent internet connection to maintain communication since each time a connection is initiated, the data-sender and data-receiver must be manually connected together.
We have also changed the way the virtual world was represented: the virtual environment now represents a robot’s-eye-view of the real world. The data set sent, via Aether, to the virtual world is sent before the robot turns in the format:
<turn direction, degrees to turn>
<move forwards>
To improve reliability we may try using a wired ethernet connection rather than Node MCU for the next session.
We’ll have two weeks to make improvements, before the next session on 8th March.
Aether 