Engineering Reality
An Engineering Solution
Here's a problem we had in mid July. This message came from Alan:
When we last left our intrepid heroes, they had acquired most of the necessary building materials and enough tools to construct the booth's frame. On Wednesday evening, Benji, Rob, Nick, and Alan valiantly began work on the structure. They sawed all the wood to the right lengths, and began predrilling holes for the screws. Then, Nick made a startling discovery: the L-brackets they had to attach the wood had their holes lined up in such a way that the screws were guaranteed to run into each other when 3 pieces of wood came together in a corner. This nefarious difficulty brought the entire evening's work to a halt, as our adventurers could not find a way around the problem. Can our heroes salvage their design? Will they need to get more parts before building further (and if so, will they remember to buy sandpaper, which they so desperately need)? Tune in next time to find out!
View of a piece of wood in the corner of the frame:
(screw holes are marked with x's)
| Left | Front |
| Side | Side |
| | |
| x | |
| | |
|x | x | <-- These screws will run into each other
| | |
| | x |
|________|_________|
Eventually we solved this problem by changing the design. We only constructed flat, 2-dimensional walls with the L-brackets, and then we connected them to each other using the bolts. This way, we never had 2 L-brackets on 2 different sides of the same piece of wood. Not only that, but the updated solution let us keep the booth disassembleable. I mention this not because the solution was terribly difficult, but because it took us three months to get past inactivity and, well, our lives to pick the booth up again. Looking back, it's surprising how many of these little problems slowed our progress.
A Video Solution
After a long discussion of a variety of camera and microphone solutions, we settled on the Logitech QuickCam Fusion for our A/V needs. We liked how easily it molded to the monitor, and that it placed the camera just above eye-level, creating as natural a look as possible. The camera's built-in microphone turned out to be more than sufficient for our audio needs. (One of my earliest concerns was that we would have to affix a high quality microphone from the top of the booth.) But most of all, we chose it because the tech stop had one in stock.
A Button Solution
Finding a "Who Da Man" button proved to take more time than I expected. Alan and I scoured the internet for hours looking for a nice big button that would do the trick. Honestly what I wanted to do was co-opt one of the "that was easy" buttons sold by Staples, which, when pressed, opens your browser to the staples.com website. There are people out there that know how to hack one of these buttons, but what we really needed was a button that was going to simulate a mouse-click or a key sequence. Sure, that might be possible, but it was beyond what we were willing to learn in the time we had. Besides, I didn't really want a button that said "easy" on it, I wanted a button that said "Who Da Man??"
The button we finally settled on was the Pedalpax SA1. It was inexpensive and easy to program. Our first solution for implementing audio playback was to pretend to run the audio player from the terminal:
start /min mplay32 /play /close "youdaman.wav"
In other words, it just ran the multimedia player in the background. This worked well until we started testing, when we discovered some latency issues and issues with multiple button presses, so we opened a port in the booth software, and it would play the sound whenever the port was tweaked. We replaced the call the mplay32 with a call to wget. In the end everything worked the way it did before, just better.
A Space Solution
Building things like walls meant we soon outgrew the small locked room. We found a nice large room used by the facilities team that, with some light lifting, had a space just large enough for, say, a video confessional booth. So we moved in on a Sunday, without permission, and on Monday I went straight to the Facilities team and begged. Thanks, Facilities team.