My Initial Final Project
Instead of a single final project idea, I had two, but did not have an idea of which direction to go in
- Building a cassette player as a fun way to learn more about something that interests me a lot. I'm super into cassettes, and am an avid collecter of them; I own a refurbished vintage cassette deck that I use to do most of my listening, and I'd like to know more about how these devices work, how they're maintained, and how they're actually made. There are two main types of cassette decks, regarding their controls, one being mechanical ('piano controlled') decks, and the other being semi-digital ('logic controlled'/'soft touch') decks. With mechanical decks, the playback, record, rewind, etc. buttons are controlled by physically altering the mode wwith the button push (maybe comparable to a stick shift), versus soft touch decks which allow you to push a button which will then initiate the command to change the mode (like an automatic car instead). My goal would be to create a logic controlled deck with a playback/pause feature, rewind, fast forward, an eject button, and hopefully a record feature.


- Creating a self-constructing geodesic dome as a design project that is more ambitious, and also sort of differs from what I usually am involved in, and is something that isn't as straightforward to create, or something that's super laid out in terms of design, construction, circuitry, and execution. With both of the obtions above, there are a lot of prescribed standards and pre-existing methods of creating them, but that's not entirely the case for this project, and I think it would be a really good challenge for me, and a change in direction to something that allows more creative freedom in its design.