Assignment 3: 3D Animations

Click on the Top Mouse to see my 3D animation. This week was probably the hardest week for me. I am not a CAD kind of guy. I like codeing but it is really hard for me to work with things "virtually", I either like programing or hands on, but not in between. In fact, when I have to make circuit boards, I let my labmates do the CAD drawings, and I just figure out the math and logistics. Part of the reason I am takeing this class is so that I can get better at 3D animations.

I spent over 10 hours this week learning SolidWorks. From scratch. I did a tutorial and made a nice gear shaft. That said I am a LONG ways off from being able to make really strong looking drawings like my mechanical engineering friends. I found a tutorial on how to design a mouse and used that to build the above mouse. Even with the tutorial it took me a few hours to figure out how to make it.

That said, I don't feel my animation describes exactly what I hope to do. I want to design a mouse that does the following:

• Detects a users pressure on the mouse.


• When you put a lot of pressure on the mouse it changes from purple to red.


• When you are holding the mouse for too long, it squeaks like a mouse.


• For a bonus, I would like it to move as well.
  

Dr. Rosalind Picard gave me this idea as research had previously been done on using mouses as a way to detect emotions (what Affective Computing does). My interest lies in "Digital Self Awareness". I would like people to be more aware of how they are working on a computer. When your environment changes based on your stress, you become more aware of your habits, and can change them from there. Hopefully with my mouse, people will be less stressed, and have less artheritas. And have one cool looking mouse!

Assignment 2: Puzzle Design

• For our second assignment I was in charge of designing a puzzle: interlocking pieces that could connect with one another. Ever since I went to Ecuador I have been just enchanted with trees, and I am obsessed with math as well. I really wanted to make a tree that grew shapes instead of leaves.
  
  As you can see my tree turned out quite great, but not before lots of struggle. First off I had to design the layout of the pieces. I sketched on a sticky note some circles and that was it for strategy, which inevitably led to:
  

  

  But before I got here I spent a good 6 hours learning Solid Works so I could make perfect notches. It didn't work, I needed to do more tutorials before I could have gotten that programming working. So I used flash, which is NOT supposed to be a CAD program but the interface was so friendly that I was able to design above in less than 30 minutes.
  
  That said, the CAD file produced confused the laser cutter, and the cutter went over all the lines twice. I would like to experiment with that a bit more.
  
  I then tried a .png file, and the laser cutter started cutting through my tree half way through the sketch.
  
  Then I decided to use cad.py instead of Unbuntu which worked pretty well. My circles were pixelated, which was a small problem, only because I want to see the true power of the laser.
  
  When my pieces were cut out, I found out that the gaps were too small, they couldn't fit on eachother. I had made my notch .145 inches, which was the proven standard, but the notches were much smaller. This was because the PNG file averages color densities for the items in flash so there were gray pixels. All of those were labeled as black in CAD.
  
  So I re-readjusted my file (enlarged it) and it worked out great.
  
  In the future I would like to make sure that I have a high pixels-inch so that the resolution is awsome. I'd also like to try to use vector base images. Furthermore, I would like to put different laser depths so that I can etch things into the leaves, like smiley faces and bark.
  
  Overall, I'm really proud of my design. People have told me I should make a bunch of them and surround my office with them. I'm thinking about makeing a tree for each season and spray painting the cardboard appropriately. Think white glitter for Winter.

Assignment 1: Brainstorming

For my first assignment, I designed Heely Shoes that were THE ULTIMATE. Heely shoes are shoes with wheels on them, which make them pretty cool, but I wanted to go farther. So I decided to go the next step,.

These shoes can:

• Produce Sparks wihen breaking
• Detect your movement with an Accelerometer
• React with LEDs
• Read your skin conductance
• Connect to the Internet

After initial presentation, I concluded that I need to narrow down my scope, but it is great to start big and go lower from there. You can click on the shoe to see my Flash presentation.