Using the whole width of the vinyl roll, I created a sign for my wall.

This was my first time using Rhino's Grasshopper. I was grateful for Nathan's awesome tutorial. Following his steps, I made a parametric press-fit dodecahedron (my Rhino and Grasshopper files). At the base of the structure is a regular pentagon, held together with circular parts. The joints can be resized dynamically. I laser cut the pieces out of cardboard which was a forgiving material. All the joints slid into place.

This was my first foray into PCB (Printed Circuit Board) production. I kept it simple and used the boilerplate template from this week's lecture. I named my in-circuit programmer Gersh.

I returned to the same shape for this week's assignment. I designed a dodecahedron (using Rhino) with an inner cube. While learning about the shape I thought it was cool that a cube can be constructed from the vertices of a dodecahedron (Steinhaus 1999). I also wanted to 3D print something that wasn’t possible to make using a subtractive tool like a CNC. I used the Formalabs and 3DWOX to make models at different scales. The first couple of attempts were unsuccessful – not enough support, too little resin, excessive support, etc, but I eventually got it.

Next was scanning an object. Sense didn't like scanning my bust or objects smaller than a handful. It did scan a bottle of Goop soap nicely (Gooop). For my dodecahedron I tried to use 123D Catch which did not turn out great. I would’ve liked to experiment scanning against different backgrounds.

This 3D heat scan was created in a collaboration with my roommate James Penn. I wanted to scan a feature that extends beyond what is visible to the naked eye. By capturing heat dissipation, I was curious to get a sense of the material properties of PLA. Our set-up included a stepper motor, two breadboards, an Arduino UNO, and a handful of electrical components, with which James made a makeshift turntable.

This week's assignment was challenging. I thought Eagle was janky (no partial search/match). The exported outer cut was too thin for the Roland (the table saw came in handy). The soldering was pretty smooth though. When testing my board, all of the traces seemed to check out. My board has two additional LED's. Here are my Eagle schematic and board files.

I chose to interpret this week's assignment differently – rather than making one big thing, I made a series of smaller things that come together into a bigger thing.

Working with metal has been something I've always wanted to do but I never had access to a metal shop… until now. I decided to make a light fixture. A cropped pyramid with openings from which light would be able to escape. While I was content with my design in Rhino, the final product was disappointing. On the brighter side, I got to use a grinder and nibbler. Hammering metal into shape was sweet.

To make home feel more like home, I created two storage units from wood scraps found at the GSD.

I created two programs this week – one to turn on an LED when pressing a button and the other to echo a phrase typed out into the console.

Just for fun, I designed a custom circuit board in Illustrator in the shape of a skull with two lights for eyes. Illustrator export settings didn’t play well with mods. When I tried to mill Morti (my name for the circuit board), the traces came out huge. The usual hack of halving the dimensions didn’t work. I will have to find the factor next week.

Having had cast a relief previously, I felt ready. Once again, I set to make a light fixture — a hollow shape large enough for a light socket. Working in Rhino, I first designed the positive then with Rob’s help I made positive three-piece mold.

On Sunday morning, it was time to mill. While my shape was relatively small, the mold positive was still larger than any of the available end mills at the shop. So, on Tuesday morning I borrowed a longer bit from the GSD. Once the milling was done, I realized I made a few errors. I resolved the errors with some tape, an X-Acto knife, and a sprinkling of Hydrostone. Then came the OOMOO. After vacuuming the substance a few times the mixture was still foamy (either due to my poor mixing skills or the compromised A/B parts) – a texture my final piece inherited.

All's well that ends well. After freeing my OOMOO negative mold from its positive part and modifying the negative mold with clay and a blade, I was ready to pour. While flawed, I was happy with the result. In future castings, I incorporated moss into the mold for an organic feel.

This week, I chose to do an analog microphone board, with an additional LED. Designing in EAGLE, took less time than before. The milling and soldering was also smooth sailing. Until...I realized only after my board was finished that one of the traces wasn’t cut. I X-Acto’ed it but I accidentally cut the wrong trace. Since the trace was under the microchip, neither a jumper wire nor 0 ohm resistor would work so I added a piece of copper. AND IT WORKED.

Inspired by Amir Karimpour, I experimented with Maya to create an interesting form for my composite. Everything came together nicely. Since the purpose of the work was aesthetic, I opted for linen in favor of burlap, which I dry fitted by making a few incisions lining the crevices. The form came out beautifully with a resolution so fine that the toolpath was apparent.

This week I reproduced Neil's speaker board (with a few trace modifications) – my EAGLE schematic and board has a custom 2 pad part. While I was able to program the board using Neil's C files I was unable to "make it do something." This is what I hope to sort out for next week, perhaps by starting with Arduino's tone() library. In the meantime, here's Dixon.

I decided to use this week to focus on connecting the dots for my final project. I've set out to get data from my microphone board, process it, and integrate it into my speaker board. I was able to record data from my microphone board by tweaking Neil's script, and to trouble shoot my speaker board.

Recording the byte values and the timestamp yielded some information. Yet it didn’t get me very far. I had no idea how to parse the information to extract the musical signal. With the speaker, I realized that the voltage I was supplying to the it was too low. When I tried the same board with different speakers (a pair with a built-in amplifier) I was able to hear the sound. To mitigate this, I tried building a non-inverting amplifier board which I forgot to power. Parsing through the speaker C code didn't get me far. While the idea for my final project idea is well defined, there are substantial gaps when it comes to implementation.

This week I hooked up my speaker board to my microphone board. I decided to use the asynchronous serial bus method (aka the easy way). I was able to generate a random sound on my speaker board using the amplitude levels perceived by my microphone.

The Arduino reads in the serial data from the microphone and sends it along its Tx line. Meanwhile, serial is also set up on the speaker board which interprets the signal and produces a sound at a frequency ten times the signal. My next step is to make sense of the serial data.

With Logan’s help I made progress encoding my microphone board with a beat detection algorithm using Damian Peckett's method. To implement the code, I had to swap out the ATtiny45 with a ATtiny85 chip as the Arduino sketch was consuming over 90% of the T45 memory. I had to run Burn Bootloader command and reconnect four resistors that came off when I replaced the chip. The other breakthrough was an improvement to my electronics schema. Instead of trying to house everything on one board or sending all the signals to all the microprocessors, I ran the beat detection algorithm on my speaker board sending serial communication only when a beat is detected. It felt more manageable to keep things modular.