Engineering Files

• Gitlab repository

Toilet Paper News

Most of the detailed documentation can be found here: https://gitlab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.23/Architecture/machine.

As a group (the Archshops section), we decided to make a toilet paper news printer. In the event that you're on the toilet in the morning, and you happened to forget your phone, what better way to pass the time than to get informed about city poiltic.

We started out by planning out the different tasks and responsibilities of the project that we could try and parallelize among the 15-20 people that comprise the Architecture section. This in itself was fairly challenging, because you can really only parallelize so much when it comes to tasks like coding or CAD.

I was responsibile for most of the codebase, as well as assisting with assembly and debugging electronics as needed. To outline the code required to print the news, we realized that dragging any kind of tool across toilet paper would most likely rip it immediately, no matter the ply.

Consequently, we settled on "stippling" the toilet paper, which required forming text from series of dots. Immediately, we had to consider things like font size, writing space, dot size, tolerances, bleeding through, and so on.

To try and tackle this, Diana and I outlined the most important parts of the code we would need, and tried to put on paper what methods and variables we would need to implement.

After most of the assembly was completed, it was a simple matter of testing the individual electronics with the code, and ensuring they worked as expected. While we initially began developing in Javascript, we switched to interfacing with the electronics via MicroPython because it was so much easier to develop in.

All the code is available in the GitLab repository for the project. The most challenging part was actually the for loop to take in a matrix of 1s and 0s and print them out in the correct locations relative to each other.

Our final videos of the machine working can be seen below: