This week, I’m hoping to create an appropriate enclosure for my laser etching art from last week. A very rough sketch below:
As so often happens, I feel a bit encumbered by parts of the project that seem completed unrelated to the assignment at hand. I really want to make the whole thing work without sacrificing my entire Arduino Uno to the endeavor. I’m not entirely sure what the limits to working with a microcontroller IC might be, but this assignment seems a good a reason as any to find out.
Basically, it suggests that I can use an ATtiny85 instead of my Arduino Uno to drive my Neopixels. Perfect! It seems that the maker had been able to successfully run Neopixel’s strandtest using just the ATtiny85, and I won’t need anything much more complicated than that.
The next bit I had to figure out was how to program my ATtiny85, and luckily, the internet continues to be a reliable resource for all my how-to questions. You could buy a tiny AVR programmer for $15…
OR, you could use your Arduino as the ISP. Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. How-to, in loving detail at high-low tech.
I wanted to be a bit price-conscious for this project, and I love the possibility of making something interesting from only the components and ICs we have for free in the ITP shop.
It took a bit to get my Arduino programmed as the ISP and then have the correct Neopixel code loaded onto my ATTiny85, but it works!
I really hate dedicating my Arduino to some single-use project for any amount of time, and I don’t want to spend the money buying additional microcontrollers when we have microcontroller chips for free in the shop. The ATTiny85 is the perfect antidote to my woes – I’m going to save soooo much money, and maybe be forced to write slightly more efficient code. I heard a lot of “just make it easier for yourself” as I was working on this, but honestly, that just sounds like, “just make it more boring for yourself.”
Now to actually program in the light patterns I want. I’ve been playing around with Neopixels for other projects, so I do have some working code to reuse here. I’m holding off on constructing the actual enclosure until I know for sure what buttons I’d want to include (and of course, what their functions would be). Playing with the ATTiny85 has been really helpful in letting me see what is possible.
What ended up happening as this assignment progressed is that as I switched to finally fabricating the box in question, I realized I had little to no time for the electronics.
To design the enclosure, I modified a Makercase box by removing the finger joints. This was one of my major missteps – I forgot to take into consideration the width of the material on all of the sides. This made construction a bit tighter than I had originally hoped and made quite a bit of my measuring and planning moot.
The plywood I had purchases was also much thicker than anything I had put into the lasercutter before, and it look a really long time. It was also my first time using wood, and I was a bit displeased with how burnt the edges looked.
In the rush of assembly, I accidentally glued the front of the box to the wrong aside of an adjoining piece.
The finished piece looks like this, and I think it might be the worst thing I’ve ever made:
I spent quite a bit of time for this week’s fabrication project pursuing what I was explicitly told not to pursue: a wooden pendulum clock. When I found myself hand-tracing diagrams I had scanned into Illustrator, I decided to shift gears (pun intended).
I still wanted to do something or make something I hadn’t done before on the laser cutter. I had previously tried vector cutting an enclosure for my pcomp midterm (thank you, Makercase), so I decided to try out raster etching using one of my own drawings.
Lately, I’ve been really into drawing weird squiggles. It seems and mostly is pretty free flowing, but every once in a while, I’ll draw a squiggle that just feels WRONG. All of which to say, apparently, there are some implicit governing principles on what makes a proper squiggle for each of these compositions.
I decided to laser cut the one below:
I replaced the colors so that they were black and white, and added a 0.01 pt red-stroked rectangle to cut out a portion of the design. I found some 1/4” clear acrylic in the unclaimed materials/junk section of the shop. I printed the design on a test piece and realized that it would take FOREVER to etch the full design onto any piece.
Luckily, our lasercutter is so weak that the test acrylic was completely untouched, and I was able to rescale the whole design, resize my vector cut rectangle and restart the job.
I first ran the job to only etch the raster portion – I did this numerous times until I saw the surface of the acrylic change. Finally, I ran the vector cuts a couple of times to ensure I had a clean cut on my design.
I used the larger material my “designed rectangle” was cut from to do a few tests. I wanted to see if I should keep the etching as is or paint the etched area white before I took off the paper adhesive cover.
The paint was actually a bit unwieldy given the intricacies of the etchings, so I decided to keep the etchings as is.
Here’s a shot of the piece before I peeled everything off:
I sort of liked how it looked with the paper on!
I wanted to see if the acrylic I had would reflect LED lights in an interesting way, and my initial tests were quite promising:
I didn’t have time to enclose the setup, but given that next week’s assignment is literally on enclosures, I thought I’d save that bit for later.
This week, Jiwon and I went on a hunt for materials to make our “jacket” to the garment district at Moods fabric. We were looking at what fabrics that we could use to elevate the sense of touch and movement. We looked into two-sided sequins that we could use for some areas of the jacket.
We also brought the multimeter to the fabric store to see if there were any other conductive materials to use to create into capacitive touch sensors, but unfortunately, most “metal” buttons that they had were either not conductive at all or conducting very minimal electricity. So we decided to not get any.
Below is a screenshot of our bill of materials spreadsheet so far:
For the product testing for this week’s class, we made a simple version of our jacket. We used the scrap fabric that we found at the soft lab and made a shirt and I sewed conductive thread onto the shirt. We then connected the conductive thread to a flexible wire then connected to the MPR121 Capacitive Touch breakout board.
We also chose some sounds to put use for sound samples to be triggered upon touch, then Jiwon wrote a very simple p5.sound sketch that triggers it.
This summer, I went to the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference and had a lot of fun in their lockpicking village. Basically, they had variety of locks hanging out on a table for folks to pick, and I especially loved this all-in-one picking station:
It served as the inspiration for this week’s fab assignment, which was to create 5 multiples. I imagined building something like this:
Ideally, I’d like to switch out the “picking modules” within the station (as I advance through harder sets of locks).
To get started, I needed to understand the basics of installing a doorknob.
This video was a decent introduction, though I wouldn’t have access to a specific jig made just for boring doorknob holes. With a bit of additional internet research, I learned that I would need a hole saw that I could attach to a drill (or drill press) to bore holes the sizes I needed (a 2 1/8” hole and a perpendicular 1” hole). I also realized I needed wood that was thick enough for a doorknob (preliminary research indicated that something between 1 3/8” and 1 3/4” would do.)
I had a very eventful trip to Home Depot. I got a 8 ft. 2”x4” and a bag full of doorknobs and padlocks… a haul that was, uh, pretty interesting to transport back to NYU.
Once back in the shop, I measured out my 2x4, sectioning off 30cm at a time. I used blue tape to mark the spot where I’d cut.
I used the miter saw to chop up my 8 footer into more manageable pieces, and soon had a stack of 30 cm slabs.
Luckily, I had a few extra slabs because once I started boring holes, my troubles really got started.
First of all, most of the hole saws in the shop are unusable. I had drilled pilot holes into my wood, but without a center bit attached to the hole saws, my drill would travel quite a bit. I ended up buying my own hole saws, and even with those, it became clear that it would be too difficult to use a hand drill. I switched to the drill press, and even then, only experienced very limited success.
You can see the disaster of those first few attempts here:
Rough.
I was pretty discouraged at this point, because even when the main 2 1/8” hole was okay, the perpendicular 1” hole seemed nearly impossible. I had to stand the slab of wood vertically on the table while clamping one end, but again, hand drilling did not seem like a feasible solution.
At this point, I asked John what he thought might be a better solution, and he asked if I needed my 2x4 slabs to be 30 cm. And no! I did not! That actually made it sooo much easier to work on the drill press for the 1” holes.
Once I realized that I could actually use the drill press for all my holes, I felt like I was back in business (I had briefly considered abandoning this whole misguided endeavor in favor of coasters or bookends or chopstick rests, or something).
It took a while before I was able to successfully drill a hole all the way through my 2x4. Part of the problem was I underestimated just how much the drill press platform would move. After I clamped everything down and double checked the degree adjustment on the platform I was finally able to cut hole through the smaller pieces.
Now knowing smaller 2x4 pieces were the way to go, I returned to the miter saw, and using my other slab as a job, was able to quickly cut up 5+ pieces of the same length.
Next, for each of the pieces, I measured 60mm out from the edge and drilled a 1/8” pilot hole to mark the center of my main doorknob hole. (Speed-clamping all over the place).
Once all the pilot holes were in, I started putting in all the 2 1/8” holes. As I worked, I felt like I began to better understand the language of the drill press. At a certain point, it would feel as though I had hit an impassable point and could not drill any further. After a bit of trial and error, I figured out that I had to raise the platform to allow the drill press to make better contact with the deeper material (though I lived in fear of moving the platform…). After a bit of adjustment and lots of double-checking, I was able to drill through each side of the slab.
It was actually quite satisfying when the “hole” finally broke through.
The completed prepped slabs are below:
At some point, I imagined having installed the doorknobs before class, but I think that will have to wait. The process outlined above spanned the space of several days and many chasms of despair and uncertainty.
But it was a lot of fun seeing myself get better at something, over a relatively short window of time.
For our next animation assignment, Joy and I decided to work together. We both had an interest in using archive or other public collection-based images, and decided to gather a few that piqued our interests.
Here were a few of my favorite images:
It seemed that we both had an interest in stories in which the moon featured prominently. Joy also had an interest in looking at stories that were from non-Western traditions. We began to explore a few online story collections that pulled from folk tales around the world. (A few collections were GREAT, and I mean to keep revisiting them: https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html & https://www.librarything.com/).
We found a few stories about the moon that appealed to us:
We decided build these stories into our piece: our primary character would make three attempts to go to the moon, succeeding on their third attempt.
“A Trip to the Moon” also served as a point of inspiration:
Initially, we considered making our primary character a young boy, but realizing that animation would allow us to be more playful, switched to raccoon as hero.
As we talked more about the story we imagined, we thought about doubling up on heros: what if two raccoons, very different in disposition but alike in passions, attempt the same journey.
We also had to locate (or create) an 2D character and prep the asset for class (essentially breaking down the moving components into different Photoshop layers). Joy and I decided to each draw a raccoon!
