Nick Durants Magic Moment

Taking something apart is a great way to understand the mechanics.
We have 2 objects to be disassembled:

Canon Printer

Eiki Board Room Projector

Adam Lans Bio

Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture
5th Year: Year Undergraduate
Works at SoArch Woodshop.
Worked for BioLogic Design Group, and Forty-Eighty Architecture
Thesis: Haptic Architecture

Looking Out: CloudWash

In this project, Berg (creators of the LittlePrinter) decides to tackle the washing machine. The video is an excellent example of how to document and describe a design process. It was very interesting to see this project evolve over time as they considered some of the human and real-world issues related to laundry. Make sure you watch to the very end. They talk about how their line of thinking on tangible interactions expands far beyond just the laundry machine.

Looking Out: SolidCon

SolidCon is a conference entirely dedicated to innovations in the ubiquitous physical computing space and designing for the post-screen world. It takes place May 21-22, 2014 in San Francisco and is made up of well respected giants such as Joi Ito (Director of MIT Media Lab) and Ivan Poupyrev (Formerly at Disney Research) to name a few. I think it would be a SOLID conference to attend, especially for those interested in the haptic interaction space.

Andre Le - Egg Drop

For this Egg Drop project, we needed to design a shock proof enclosure for an Arduino circuit that was to be dropped off of the top of the 3-story CFA building. 

I tried experimenting with techniques that I have not tried using before and improvising along the way. 

I started with the circuit design:

The goal of this was to use the space savings gained by the Arduino Micro to the best of my ability. I used a piezoelectric sensor as an input to detect vibrations. This eliminated the need for an external switch to activate the output. I also knew that the piezoelectric sensor could be turned into a transducer by applying voltage through it. Unfortunately, I needed PWM pins to create the sounds and Analog pins to read the input. However, after digging into the documentation for the ATMega328 chip onboard the Arduino, I realized that it has several pins that can be used as analog input as well as PWM output. After some breadboarding, I found that I could the piezo sensor into both an input AND output simultaneously.

By keeping the number of components down and the footprint small, I could make a smaller and lighter box in hopes that it would reduce the impact of the fall. I measured the size requirements with my digital calipers and created a tool path for the laser cutter with those dimensions in mind.

The material I used was basswood, with the hopes that the soft wood would be less brittle than a dense hardwood. The slices were aligned and glued together with wood glue. Holes were drilled for the screws and countersunk to be flush with the surface. The final piece was sprayed with Shellac to protect the surface. 

Let's hope this isn't the last time we see this alive.

Austin McCasland - Egg Drop

There is a button and a light which are both flush with the face of the box.  You may press into the button and take the box's pulse.  If it is still alive, it will have a heartbeat.  Here's hoping it survives the fall!

Children's Museum: What Did We Learn Today?

Ethnographers:  Given what you know explicitly about the museum, what design choices are implicit in these objects?  Use the caption to comment with your initials in parentheses.

ex. made of durable materials (zjw),

(non regular electical conduit(BMS)

(well made camera housing: durable, functional, stylistic) BMS

(designed around sound, encourages physical interaction;

implicit instructions, messy & inefficient collection) BMS