Amy Apple

A design/engineering strength and area for growth (2pts)

One of my design/engineering strengths is conceptualization and coming up with an idea, an area I want to grow in is sticking to an idea like last year in d&t I had hard time committing to a final idea.

At least three things I want to commit to in the documentation of my learning and projects. (1pt)

The first thing I want to make sure I document on the site is how I got from the last thing I posted to the most current thing. I also want to make sure I can fully explain everything on the slides and that I fully understand how it works. I also want to make sure that other people who don't know the class still understand how it works and are able to follow my process.

Circuit board final sketch

My partner Ernesto and I came up with with design for our circuit board. We found a sketch of it online and we really liked the concept and idea of using it for our board. The circuit board will be a circle (still figuring out size) with the mountains and sun rays silk screened on. The switch to turn it on and off will be on one of the mountains. The Led's will be in random places on different sun rays.

Circuit board design

This is Ernesto and I's schematic for our circuit board. It has a space to put the a battery and a switch to help control the flow of electricity and then several Led's in a parallel circuit. We used parallel because its more efficient with electricity and then all the led's will have more power.

This is our final board using the schematic from above. All the lines that are white will be silk screened on so they won't conduct any electricity. I learned a lot while making this board. This is the most amount of LED's I've ever had to put on one board so figuring out where they are going to go was challenging and definitely a step up from our previous projects in this class.

This is Ernesto and I's printed circuit board. I soldered on one switch on and just started soldering on one battery holder.

Ideation Sketches

These are my ideation ideas that I brainstormed during class. The 3 I liked the best where a treasure chest where you can open it up and see the electronics. I also chose a cat shaped speaker that will be a semi circle/ half oval with speakers being the eyes and made out of acrylic. My final design that I chose was a slanted box with speakers mounted on either side.

Final Design Sketch

Rhino Model

This is my sketch of my cat shaped speaker. I'm going to use the larger black speakers as my cats eyes. And my light board will go behind the nose acrylic and light up pink when the speaker turns on. Its going to be a basic box with 2 cat shaped pieces on either side of it. I chose this design because I liked the idea of making my speaker shaped as an animal and also wanted to make it look like my cat.

These are a picture of my model on Rhino. The right side in the file I will print on the lazer-cutter and the one on the right is what it will look like when I assemble it all together.

Final enclosure model

This is my final enclosure model. It consists of two flat shaped acrylic pieces and between then being a box with cut outs slotting together. There will also be a cat nose and whiskers etched/glued on. I'm also considering adding legs under the box to bridge the gap between the bottom of the box and the ground to add extra support but at the moment I'm not planning on having anything there.

This is my completed breadboarded speaker. I think it was important to include breadboarding as a step because if you make a mistake while breadboarding it's much easier to fix but if you solder something together its difficult to fix those mistakes. I learned a lot about how my speaker works while breadboarding. Before I was confused about how my speaker was going to actually work but through the breadboarding process I learned about all the steps it takes to have a speaker that works.

This is our collaborative problem, it will pick a random number between 0-100 ten times and print them all out,

This me and Henry's final PCB and we added our names on skill screen.

This is Ernesto and I's project with the feather board. It makes 2 columns show up red and then the next two show up purple even though the color name says blue.

Fernanda and I altered this code to have a star in the code.

For my digital project I will be using the neopixel grid, I want to make a wave shaped pattern that scrolls on the screen from left to right. This isn't my final idea but is something I think would be fun to do.

PXL_20221128_192007486.mp4

To the right is a picture of my soldered pbc made I designed with py partner.

Here is a picture of my unsoldered amplifier circuit board.

I finished soldering my amplifier and works!

All of my peices of my enclosure are done but I need to glue and put electronics inside.

This is my final speaker! Its a cat and is roughly based off one of my cats! Overall I'm really happy with how it turned out. Even thought the ear was an accident I think it adds a nice touch. If I were to re-do this project I would probably make the joints cleaner so that they are held together with tension instead of glue for a cleaner look. Something I'll take with me from this class is that the design process is really important and to spend more time designing to help your final project look exactly how you want it to.