Genius Bar Signage
Brief
Research
Idea development
Prototyping
Testing
Evaluation Modification
glass
acrylic
metal
LED lights
Silicone
Tin
glass, metal, and acrylic.
CNC ROUTER
A CNC router is a machine used to cut certain materials including wood, plastic, and metals. in our case, we are using designs that we've made from inkscape, moving them to Vcarve, a CNC software, and using Shopbot, another software, to cut out the design on the CNC router.
Safety instructions include wearing safety glasses, ear protection and clamping down the material being used.
step 1: make file in inkscape
step 2: save as Dxf file
step 3: save file on thumb drive
step 4: select material
step 5: Load material selected
step 6: secure material
step 7: open file on CNC computer (Vcarve)
step 8: set up job size
step 9: move file to fit
step 10: define tool path inside and outside
step 11: select appropriate tool path
step 12: add tabs to tool path if necessary
step 13: save tool paths individually
step 14: open CNC software
step 15: the z axis
step 16: 0 the x and y axis
step 17: Load file on shop bot software
step 18: drag down 2d offset
step 19: press start
I deleted all of the comments off of the code
I changed the Pin to Letterspin
Jigsaw cutter and sanding paper
Building the Actual Sign
once we finished using the CNC to cut out our sign we needed to do these steps
1) Remove the material from the CNC surface
2) Use the jigsaw to cut all of the tabs so the pieces could be separated
3) Sand the edges of all of the pieces to remove the extra parts of the tabs and make the edges smooth.
4) use the table saw and miter saw to make the inside supports so that we can easily assemble our sign.
5) we glued down the supports using wood glue, the we clamped everything together. We then nailed everything together using a finish nail gun.
6) After letting it dry and removing the clamps we took our sign outside and sprayed painted it. to the left is a picture of our current status
Building the Neopixel circuit
7
Installing the lights
7) Now that we have our neopixel coded for yellow we installed it.
Spray painting
The first thing we did today was spray painting the interior of the genius bar prototype to help with illuminating the lights that we plan on putting inside.
LED lights
Using tinkercad, we tested and out LED lights that would be powered by a bread board to make yellow lights for the interior of the sign prototype. After testing it on tinkercad, we made it in real life and tested it out on the sign prototype and taped the mylar to the front of the sign saying 'Genius bar' to help diffuse the sign.
Putting up the sign
After testing the lights out on tinkercad, spray painting, the inside, and taping everything together, we held the sign up to where we are planning to put the sign.
Next class period the improvements we plan to change the positioning of the lights to make sure that we can hide as much of the light as possible but make the projection still visible.
Coding
today, we worked on recoding our tinker cad to have LED lights light up for both the battery/loading section of the genius bar sign and the letter part pf the genius bar sign.
2 working neo pixel codes
#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>
#ifdef __AVR__
#include <avr/power.h> // Required for 16 MHz Adafruit Trinket
#endif
#define LETTERSPIN 6 // On Trinket or Gemma, suggest changing this to 1
#define BATTERYPIN 10
#define NUMPIXELS 20 // Popular NeoPixel ring size
Adafruit_NeoPixel pixelsLETTERS(NUMPIXELS, LETTERSPIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);
Adafruit_NeoPixel pixelsBATTERY(NUMPIXELS, BATTERYPIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);
#define DELAYVAL 500 // Time (in milliseconds) to pause between pixels
void setup() {
#if defined(__AVR_ATtiny85__) && (F_CPU == 16000000)
clock_prescale_set(clock_div_1);
#endif
pixelsLETTERS.begin();
pixelsBATTERY.begin();
}
void loop() {
pixelsLETTERS.clear();
for(int i=0; i<NUMPIXELS; i++) {
pixelsLETTERS.setPixelColor(i, pixelsLETTERS.Color(0, 0, 255));
pixelsLETTERS.show();
delay(DELAYVAL);
pixelsBATTERY.clear();
}
for(int i=0; i<NUMPIXELS; i++) {
pixelsBATTERY.setPixelColor(i, pixelsBATTERY.Color(100, 100, 55));
pixelsBATTERY.show();
delay(DELAYVAL);
}
}
genius bar lights
We transferred our code from Tinkercad onto our battery set of lights and our letters set of lights in real life and put it on to the Genius bar prototype.
Spray painting
Today, we spray painted the inside of the genius bar prototype again to help with making the lights look more professional and make lights more visible rather than having the back ground black
Putting lights on
After spray painting the back ground, we changed the location of the lights and reprogrammed them to try and make them brighter and make the actual LED objects less visible to the people looking. Ben and I also made a barrier to black the rest of the signs light from the battery light.