[LATHE #1] -- Wooden Mallet

[SKILL BUILDER] #5 -- Wood Lathe

[MIDTERM] Sunrise Prototype v1 & v2

[FINAL PROJECT] User Testing Feedback & Final Presentation

I spent the last week user testing my Sunrise app and device, which was an interesting experience. I initially thought that user testing with just 5 people was not going to be enough, but 5 does indeed seem to be the magic number. Within the first 2-3 users, I had a good idea of the major issues that needed to be addressed, and by 5 I was consistently getting the same feedback.

Initially, users were confused about whether the device itself was a clock or not. I had originally envisioned it being more of an art piece of wood and light that evoked the sun. However, my test users wanted for it to have the capability to behave like a more straightforward clock during the day.

  Additionally, users wanted clarifications made to the various settings available to them. They felt that some of the interfaces did not provide enough feedback.

A full write up of the process, UI changes made, and next steps can be found in the slides for my final presentation.

[SKILL BUILDER] #4 -- CNC Joints

[FINAL PROJECT] Sunrise Alarm App

User Experience Mapping

[SKILL BUILDER] #3 -- TechnoCNC Router

3 Final Project Ideas

1. Freida -- No Wait Food Freida is a 28 year old chef who works as a recipe developer for a meal-kit company. She spends the majority of her day on her feet working in a test kitchen. Most nights when she gets off work she is tired and does not want to cook dinner for herself.

However, she often finds that she "can’t find a decent restaurant without a wait, and wastes [her] limited time and money on experiences/food that is underwhelming."

  She wishes there was an easy way to find restaurants/bars nearby that had available seats.

IDEA: Website/app that pulls data from restaurant reservation APIs (Resy, OpenTable, etc) and shows bar/restaurants in the area that have availability within a certain time window (ex. now to 30min). This would work even better if I could get POS data from restaurants to see open tables/open bar seats, but would require more access.

2. Dan -- Fitness to the People

Dan is a 31 year old personal trainer and climber who owns his own personal training business that operates out of a climbing gym in the city.

When he's not training clients, Dan spends a lot of time studying peer reviewed research on strength, mobility, and wellness. Dan also has Crohn's disease, and is very interested in nootropics.

Dan wants to share the knowledge he has gained through his training and research, especially to the climbing commmunity, but believes that this information would get lost in the sea of information if it were a blog. He is not interested in making money from this.

IDEA: Build a platform for centralized knowledge distribution to climbers. Interview other climbers to understand where they get their training/mobility/wellness information currently (or if at all) and develop a platform for distribution.

  3. Katie -- Natural Wine Recommendations

Katie is a 26 year old yoga teacher who teaches at an upscale studio in tribeca.

Katie loves to drink wine with friends, and recently has become especially interested in natural/biodynamic wines. However, she is frustrated by the lack of easily available information (and gate-keeping) on natural wines. Rather than being forced to go to specialty wine shops and ask for suggestions, Katie would like to be able to get recommendations on her phone.

IDEA: Build a website/app that allows user to track the natural wines they drink and provides recommendations based on the users' choices. It should also show the user where they can purchase the wine--data is available via winetracker API. Additionally, allow user to select food and provide them with recommend wine pairings.

OtherMill Project

[SKILL BUILDER] #2 -- OtherMill

This skill builder is also step 1 in my goal of making spring loaded camming devices (SLCD, aka a cam) in this class.

Created two SVG files in illustrator with a basic cam lobe--one for overall cut, one for axle hole

SVG files loaded into Bantam Tools

Adding the aluminum stock to the mill

Missing shots of loading and homing the machine, here it is starting to cut

Over an hour fifteen minutes to go...

[arve url="https://giphy.com/embed/xUOwG34rYNx4JYKUc8" /]

It's done!

Pulled out of the machine, rough edges

Up close after breaking the scrap material off

A few quick passes with a sanding block and it's smooth enough to handle

Done, for now!

[Week 2] BLE Peripheral -- Weather Station

I created a simple BLE weather station peripheral that uses a DHT22 sensor to get temperature and humidity values. The peripheral gets sensor values every 1 second and broadcasts the values over BLE.

Arduino code

// add libs
#include 
#include 

// define IO pins
#define HUMIDITY_SENSOR_PIN 6

// initialize vars
unsigned long previousMillis = 0;
unsigned short interval = 2500;

// initialize DHT sensor
DHT dht(HUMIDITY_SENSOR_PIN, DHT22);  // on pin 6

// initialize BLE peripheral and service
BLEPeripheral blePeripheral;
BLEService tempService = BLEService("FF99");

// define BLE service characteristics
BLEFloatCharacteristic temperatureCharacteristic = BLEFloatCharacteristic("BBB1", BLERead | BLENotify | BLEBroadcast);
BLEDescriptor temperatureDescriptor = BLEDescriptor("2901", "temp F*");
BLEFloatCharacteristic humidityCharacteristic = BLEFloatCharacteristic("BBB2", BLERead | BLENotify | BLEBroadcast);
BLEDescriptor humidityDescriptor = BLEDescriptor("2901", "humidity %");

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println(F("Serial online..."));
  dht.begin();
  Serial.println(F("DHT started!"));

  // set name and advertise BLE peripheral
  blePeripheral.setLocalName("dht-temp");
  blePeripheral.setDeviceName("dht-temp");
  blePeripheral.setAdvertisedServiceUuid(tempService.uuid());

  // add BLE service and characteristic
  blePeripheral.addAttribute(tempService);
  blePeripheral.addAttribute(temperatureCharacteristic);
  blePeripheral.addAttribute(temperatureDescriptor);
  blePeripheral.addAttribute(humidityCharacteristic);
  blePeripheral.addAttribute(humidityDescriptor);

  //temperatureCharacteristic.broadcast();
  //humidityCharacteristic.broadcast();
  blePeripheral.begin();
}

void loop() {
  blePeripheral.poll();
  Serial.println("LOOP");

  // read sensors @ 2 sec interval
  if (millis() - previousMillis > interval) {
    getTemp();
    getHumidity();
    previousMillis = millis();
  }
}

void getTemp() {
  // read sensor val
  float temperature = dht.readTemperature(true);  // true = fahrenheit

  if (isnan(temperature)) {
    Serial.println("DHT Temp not found...");
    temperature = 0;
    temperatureCharacteristic.setValue(temperature);
  } else if (temperatureCharacteristic.value() != temperature) {
    temperatureCharacteristic.setValue(temperature);
    Serial.print("Temp: ");
    Serial.print(temperature);
    Serial.print(" *F");
    Serial.println();
  }
}

void getHumidity() {
  // read sensor val
  float humidity = dht.readHumidity();

  if (isnan(humidity)) {
    Serial.println("DHT Humidity not found...");
    humidity = 0;
    humidityCharacteristic.setValue(humidity);
  } else if (humidityCharacteristic.value() != humidity) {
    humidityCharacteristic.setValue(humidity);
    Serial.print("Humidity: ");
    Serial.print(humidity);
    Serial.println();
  }
}

Fritzing diagram

Week 1 -- Things I Love && Things I Hate

I LOVE I love my knife. It's not a particularly fancy knife, as far as chef's knives go, but it is high quality. Cheap, stamped knives don't hold an edge well and make cutting a chore. High-end Japanese knives cut like butter, but don't stand up to abuse. My knife stays sharp, and survives every trip to the utensils drawer my absentminded roommate subjects it to.

My knife fits perfectly in my hand. In my hands, my knife has cleaned a deer, cooked dinner for 30, and prepped a lot of chili ingredients. But my knife never feels better in my hands than when I am dicing an onion.

I HATE

Hate is probably too strong of a word, but I  strongly dislike the UX of Google Maps on iOS. It is frustrating and feels condescending--I am not stupid, please don't treat me like I am.

This is most apparent while driving. There's nothing like inputting a destination, putting on Spotify and then being interrupted a couple minutes into my drive with, "You are on the fastest route!" I mean yeah, no shit, that's the whole reason I am using Google Maps, what else would I be on? This continues as I am driving: "There is a 5 min slowdown ahead, you are still on the fastest route." WHY ARE YOU INTERRUPTING MY MUSIC TO TELL ME THIS USELESS INFORMATION!?

By far the worst "feature", though, is the auto-zoom to the driving route. Before some engineer/designer mucked this up back in 2016, you could pinch to zoom out and see more of your route. I really like to do this when I'm somewhere unfamiliar so I know the general direction I'm headed and can anticipate lane changes/turns. Now, though, I'm stuck with one super zoomed-in view of the route, or a super high level overview of the whole map (unusable on a trip longer than 10 minutes). Try to pinch to zoom out but accidentally touch anywhere on the actual route itself? BOOM, auto-zooms all the way back in--WHY? I wish I had the email address of the person who designed this so I could send them hate mail. My girlfriend is tired of listening to me yell at my phone in the car.

Week 1 -- Statement of Purpose

What's in a name?

I don't really like the word manifesto, it sounds archaic to me. Manifesto conjures up images in my head of a text about that plight of the proletariat that bears little relevance to my everyday life. As corporate-speak as it might sound, I think statement of purpose better conveys what I am aiming for.

With that in mind, I wrote a statement of purpose for myself as a creator, maker, and artist.

I will create work that is honest, engaging, and challenging. Work that challenges me--and inspires others--to push boundaries. Work that makes the world a better place. Work that forces me to grow my skills, to empathize with others, and to be fully present.

I will focus on the human side of design and experience, rather than just the technical. I will follow through and complete projects, even when I don't want to. I will express my voice, fully and authentically, without regard to the judgement of others.  I will empower others to find their voice.

I can't wait to revisit this in a year, 5 years, 10 years to see what changes and what doesn't!

[SKILL BUILDER] #1 -- Hand Router

Assembling all the tools:

Dowel pin hole drilled, circle jig attached

First pass through, realizing the plywood was super cheap--there is a void going throughout the board that caved from the pressure of my hand on the jig

Mounting the board to a second ply board so I can go all the way through without a router table

At this point I had a reasonably nice circle, and was planning to make some designs on it and round the edges. Turns out we don't have a round over bit though

Measuring circle diameter in order to add more peg holes for the jig. I should've spent more time doing this instead of basically eyeballing it.

Holes cut, pin added

First pass on one side, realizing that I'm essentially going to be making a yin-yang.

Second pass on the other side. This is where the results of my inaccurate measuring are more apparent.

At this point, I've got a yin-yang and I want to do something with the edges.

Without no router table available, I tried to mount the circle to the edge of the table, route a section, and spin it to the next. Not the best choice. You can see how rough the cuts are in this photo.

It was already ugly, but I wanted to take this a step further by routing the other side to create a super tapered edge...bad idea. I ended up losing chunks of plywood as I was going and stopping about halfway through because it was so bad.

All in all, I didn't make anything worth keeping, but it was definitely a learning experience. Using the circle jig provided a ton of stability and control, while trying to freehand the edges proved difficult without the right equipment (table). I'd definitely like to try that again when I have access to a router table, but for now I think just creating channels in wood could be an interesting way to hide lighting/cables.