Project 2: Brainstorming and Construction

Project 2 was assigned to us this Tuesday and it is due to be presented next Tuesday. The assignment is shown below:

Project 2 Houseware / Hardware Hack or Circuit Bending
Hardware hacking can consist of either making new hardware, or simply modifying old hardware. Circuit bending is, to creatively short-circuit devices such as, low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers, to create new musical instruments and sound generators.

Our group first brainstormed about the different skills that we had that we could apply to this project. Between our group we had 3 CS majors and an Art major. None of us had any real experience working with hardware or circuitry but I did know how to sodder and understood how circuits should work from physics courses.
We checked whether anyone in the group had any hardware laying around their apartments that we could use but no one seemed to have any. Andrea (the art student) did have a lot of tools and items like a hot glue gun that we were able to use. We figured that we couldn't really come up with an idea for a project without knowing what materials we will be able to work with so we decided to check what hardware was available at Goodwill and brainstorm ideas while there.
The next day (Wednesday) we went to Christiansburg and while at Goodwill we found a light-up display case for electronic flowers. We thought it would be cool to utilize the display case and enhance the lighting to display a scene inside the display case.
One idea we had was to remove the existing flowers from the case and to replace them with flowers we made out of glass. We then thought of showing something other than just flowers and the idea came to us to show a tornado. We purchased the display case and glass cups from Goodwill and shopped around for a small device with a motor that we could use to make the tornado spin. We eventually found a childrens toy at Wal-Mart and added it to our supplies.



We met again on Thursday during class to begin work on the construction of our project. We managed to completely disassemble the display case and childrens toy, and smash up a lot of glass to use for the tornado.






We met again on Sunday to rebuild the electronics inside of the display case and to create an internal structure. This involved a lot of soddering and gluing. It was very difficult to hold the motor in place while it was on but we eventually devised a structure using extra exacto-knife blades and hot glue to hold it still. Then finally on Monday we met for the last time to construct the glass tornado on top of the motor. We finished that evening and were ready to present the next day.