So the finals are done. What an experience! As soon as the class was over, everyone got a second breeze of energy to go for more and more but now it’s hard to even pull ourselves from sofa…
Anyway, let’s review what we’ve got for the final presentation. As we wrote in the previous post, we got our object to work. The remaining work we still had to cover was:
- figure out the connections (to move away from copper)
- choose final components
- finish fabrication
Connections
We decided to give a shot to the magnets, as we have purchased bunch of them at the beginning of the project anyway.
For the test we drilled two holes on each of the layers to make connections work:
- two holes in the center of the ground piece
- 4 holes (2 on top and 2 on the bottom) of the middle piece
- 2 holes at the bottom of the top piece
Just to note: it’s super hard to solder on the magnets as they keep running away! We’ve spent a lot of time to make it happen. The magnetism reduced a lot as we hitting magnets up in soldering.
Final components
As for now, we sticked to the LEDs. There are 4 LEDs in total: 3 on the bottom piece and one on the top. As both top and the bottom of the middle piece is acrylic, when you stack the pieces together, it looks like LEDs are in all of them.
Fabrication
Shir also used CNC again to cut the new pieces. We first cut the pieces out of blue foam to make sure that the final is as we need it and then moved on to the wood.
Here’s what we’ve got:
We’ve got really good feedback during our presentation, you can find the presentation here.
All our fellow classmates expressed that Stacklight could be a good toy/product in the future if we keep working on it. By product, we mean that Stacklight could also have a function as a lamp (in this case, parents and children could play together and it would also have a function).
Users can stack rounds that have lamp inside up, depending on how much light they would need to consume. This can be a really good idea for the future side project.
Some options for the future:
- Work on better connections (magnets still keep running away and we should try working with bigger ones)
- Play with different outcomes (sound, motor, etc.)
- Try different wood (dark one should look really good together with acrylic)
- Add a pocket for battery disassembling
We have also applied for the ITP Winter Show: if we get in, we’ll have to work on some of the things from that list!
Update: we got in! The ITP Winter Show takes place on December 20-21 and everyone is welcome! More info here.
Although with frustrations it was a really good project: including research, playtesting with kids, pcomp part itself, and, of course, teamwork.
Here are some more pictures from the presentation:
