thesis { a work in progress

alienation keychain pcb

tom — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:44:12 +0000

Here is the PCB, fresh from Advanced Circuits. I threw it together and mocked it up with the battery from sparkfun for size. It looks like it’ll be fine. For scale, I measured it against my thumb. It’s a little thicker than I’d like, as I’m thinking about casting a resin box for it (probably not in time for the thesis presentation, more likely for the show), and the size may make it kind of unwieldy for a pocket. Otherwise I’m pretty happy with it.

The last couple days I’ve been doing some writing of the thesis paper. Tomorrow, I debug the xbee circuits with the new PCB controlling them, and hopefully plan out how I am going to build the insecurity prosthesis that has me kind of stymied at the moment. Triage time!

Also, this is a really nice review of the new Iron Man movie, talking about a lot of the same stuff that I’m working through as I write. Zeitgeist?

other uses of red thread

tom — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:07:17 +0000

This is great. Artist and photographer Nina Katchadourian patches spiderwebs.

“uninvited collaborations”

early thesis outline, alienation prosthetic update

tom — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:37:50 +0000

Over the weekend, I put together an early outline for the kinds of things I want to cover in my thesis paper. It needs another revision, and will undoubtedly be edited down for scope as I work. In this case, I tend to go too large in what I want to address in my work, and will probably want to focus more literally on the projects and interactions that I am building rather than writing a research paper in and of itself. There’s time for that stuff later. The outline is here.

After re-stringing the anxiety prosthesis, i worked on making an PCB design for the body component of the alienation prosthesis. I wanted something pocket sized so that you could keep it with you at all times. I figured a key chain would be a nice object to make, so I kept it pretty small. This design measures in at a little over 2 inches by 1 inch and maybe a half inch thick. It’ll use a flat lithium polymer battery to give power, and has a tiny switch so that it can work during a presentation and not be out of juice. For today, I’m working on a final debug of the electronics in the alienation prosthesis, and in the evening I’ll be moving into making a final prototype of the insecurity prosthesis.

final in-class presentation

tom — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:47:38 +0000

Here is the presentation I gave today (10.4 MB).

It was pretty okay, I got some really good comments from Nancy Hechinger about how to frame my work and clarify definition. Useful… exactly what I needed to hear before moving into the final framing of my work before the presentation before the thesis committee.

anxiety prosthesis–basically completed

tom — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:32:25 +0000

the last couple of days I have been working really hard to try to finish the anxiety prosthesis in time for my presentation in class today. Here’s link dump of my progress. Generally, I put it all together, moving from sewing the two pieces together to screwing them together, adding grommets to route the bunches of thread that will control the hackles into, replacing the pulleys with very tall eyelets, and making eyelets that will route the thread over the shoulders into the grommet holes. Overall, it’s been pretty successful, but needs some fine tuning to have it work well while being worn. I like the action and motion a lot though. Video is coming.

Bonus shot of me testing the fit in the bathroom.

alienation prosthesis

tom — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 03:53:42 +0000

finished the sewing up of the boxes. took some glamour shots. The next step is to make a pocket-sized controller for the xbee and then it’s done! whew!

(besides calibrating and testing the lighting and stuff like that, but i want to have my little victories)

alienation prosthesis–sewing, anxiety prosthesis–pulleys

tom — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:44:37 +0000

Today felt pretty good. I cast a new, thin layer of silicone for the top of the alienation boxes and sewed it on. Then I put together a bunch of the pulley wheels and attached them to the back of the anxiety prosthesis.

alienation prosthesis–boxtop stitching

tom — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:30:44 +0000

I took a break from the anxiety prosthesis to try stitching up the boxtops for the alienation prosthesis today. It’s pretty tough. I have a decent stitch going, but the thickness of the silicone makes it hard to do around all of the sides. Spending like 6 hours for one side of one box in the end is not very encouraging. I’m thinking of making new, thinner casts for the boxtops.

anxiety prosthesis–construction I

tom — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:16:13 +0000

Today I finished sharpening the tool to cut out the shapes for the anxiety prosthesis. I got a whetstone, and went to town. I have a newfound respect for the skills necessary to do that kind of thing–keeping the blade straight enough to sharpen over the course of maybe a hundred strokes while trying to ensure that the blade isnt curving or getting any part of the edge off of the surface is tough.

In any case, I punched out the hackles and trimmed them off with an xacto knife. Now I’m in the middle of assembling the hardware to eventually control them. As usual, here are some pictures:

anxiety prosthesis–skin demold #2

tom — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:55:17 +0000

Today I demolded the skin from the second round of painting on silicone to the plaster cast. Here are some photos of the first result and some in progress shots of the second.

I also got some aluminum and made a tool for cutting out the hackles from the second skin, and marked approximately the layout of where they will go on the silicone.