learning the ropes

I took a short movie of Kelly walking across the kitchen, opening the door, and walking through it. The motion of her forearms created a 3-dimensional volume which I rendered in aluminum and brass tubing joined with aircraft cables.

On Thursday night I brought the structure home on the bus and found it to be quite the conversation starter. It was interesting to watch people watching me.

Design Process

Near completion

The Structure

(from Lisa)

We continue to work on the housing for the sensor. We explore other
options to the lucite house, as the machining of it really time
consuming. We go back to the lucite housing, and retest the sensor to
make sure it still works. Michael does some stomping. It still works.

The question is as to whether this housing will last long-term as
built. The area with the solder seems to be the new vulnerable spot.
(Before the “ vulnerable spot” was the connector.) Will our strain
relief stand the test of time?? Stay tuned patient viewers..

We decide to create 2 versions, one is as described above, the other
is heat shrinked.
We are almost ready for user testing! Woo-hoo.. We still need to
attach them to the shoes, and will be attaching one to the front left
and the other to the front right, and seeing which is the victor, in
the test of durability.

(notes from Lisa)
Making a really robust flex sensor and a package to contain it.
The task at hand is how to house the sensors so that the “tail” will
be protected, and still function.
We start using a perf board, then put heat shrink tubing on the
sensors in order to that the contacts were secured.

We are looking to cut a hole out of the lucite blocks.
The idea is to make a channel through it to protect the top of the
sensor from being stamped and stepped and stomped on.
So we attach the female header to the perf. board, and solder it on.

I don’t like that I can’t make a clean square cut with the dremmel
tool on the lucite-housing.

Lisa, Hatti, and I are in the planning (some might say “requirements gathering”) stage of our Physical Computing midterm project.

We have been brainstorming and brainstorming more, but haven’t committed to an idea yet.