Kira Allen

One of my design/engineering strengths is my ability to stay focused. An area of growth is patience when something doesn't work after a few tries.

3 things to commit to in documentation:

Include thorough descritions with all images
Document every step of the ideation and creating process
Ensure the images are clear and not overly cluttered.

Series circuit

A simple series circuit using four lights and one resistor.

Parallel circuit

A parallel circuit with switches. The two rightmost switches control the red and yellow lights respectively, which share a resistor. The leftmost switch can flip between the blue and green lights, always one or the other. The right and left parts of the circuit can be controlled inndependently.

PCB Concept Sketches

My favorite designs among these are the crab, butterfly, and dragon. The circles on each design are meant to show where the LEDs will fall.

Speaker designs

I came up with 20 sketches for my speaker. The top ten were guided, and the bottom ten were done on my own. My favorites among them have stars labelling them; the separate container design, the tensegrity design, and the honeycomb design. I think that of those, the honeycomb may be the frontrunner, since it has a simple and theoretically easily achieved design, whereas the other two, while very cool, would be much more difficult to pull off. The honeycomb design is also the most mobile of the three.

Chipboard Prototype

This is my chipboard prototype of the speaker. I cut it with the laser cutter and everything seems to have turned out well! Some of the assembly is quite messy because the chipboard is much thinner than the real wood and acrylic would be. The battery fits inside, but since the width of the wood isn't accurate, that may not necessarily remain the case. All of the joins went together super nicely, they were all pretty tight fits but slid together with pressure. The holes on the bottom also lined up well. One note about assembly: I have to make sure that the two speaker piece combine in the correct way otherwise nothing else will fit. Also, I had a ton of little hexagons from all of the holes. It could be fun to attach them to the top of the speaker for a little extra texture!

PCB: Crab

Here's my cut PCB! I started putting in the resistors, but nothing is sautered yet. The crab came out pretty well, though we had to simplify the design a lot. It's readable as a crab even though it's not super detailed.

This is the PCB that Aksh and I made on Eagle, and eventually in our actual lamps. Eagle keeps crashing when I try to open it, so this is the only screenshot I have of the design.

Rhino Files

This is the design for my lamp made on Rhino. The 3d model is on the left, and the lines for printing are on the right.

Unfortunately, I got sick on the last day of class and was unable to complete my speaker; however, I intend to finish it next semester. So far, I have cut the acrylic and some of the wood. Several parts of the wood were messed up, so those will have to be redone.