Initial Ideas
Here's my thought process to a final project
I wanted a project that fell into 3 main criteria:
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1.
Something cute The project had to have a cute factor, look good and like something I'd want to interact with -
2.
Something interactive I wanted rather than a static light display, I wanted something where actions that the user took affect the state of the item. I wanted the item to give feedback to the user. -
3.
Something useful I wanted an item that I would be compelled to use in my daily life. Though I realize now this list of demands is a bit high for a semester project so now I'm thinking as long as I get to make something that I get to use my art and embedded programming skills in one project, I don't care so much for it being super practical.
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A tactile calendar.
Why? I wanted something useful. I didn't like using my google calendar I'd always forget to pull it up so a visual calendar would be useful. So I wanted a calendar that would pull my google calendar events to it. But these already exist and aren't that interesting to make in terms of product design and form (just a big screen) so I abandoned this idea. -
How Hydrated am I?.
Also something useful, I used to use some apps where you water a cute plant by logging whenever you drank water as a way to motivate you to stay hydrated. However I found that with no accountability I would just log I drank water when I didn't so my plants wouldn't die.
The idea is that I would have a way of inserting a device into a water bottle that would measure the amount of water I drank. Then that device could communicate via Bluetooth to some other device that would react to me drinking water.
The other device would be some cute animal that would get more energetic as I drank more water.
However, I found that this project would be a bit too big for the time frame I had so I abandoned this idea as well.