Week20 - Final Project Development

Tuesday 29-May-2018

I bought different speakers on this day, see below.

Sunday 27-May-2018

I asked my instructor if I could laser cut a balloon to get the rubber sheet from, she said it is allowed. she also suggested if i could do my own rubber sheet using the silicon mold we have. I thought i would give that a try, I searched a bit to find if someone actually did it before, i didnt find much except i found this, it is titled "A Method for Casting Thin Epoxy Films" anyway i saw this figure in the second page and right away i knew I wanna try this.

So the methods I tried were 2, pouring on top of a tiny acrylic circle, and the sandwich technique i learned from the pdf.

Above is the test i am going to pour on top of.

Above Is the sandwich method after it was done peeling.

The pouring method didn't work as i want it to be, it was too thin, and not smooth at all from one side. However the sandwich method was magic, it was perfect although bubbly, it felt like it was right thickness for the project, sadly i lost the piece and i didnt measure the thickness of the sample. but here is a pic.

Sunday 3-June-2018

-I worked on the speaker, i soldered 2 wires on it and connected it to the arduino. I used the melody tunes example, it worked!

-I also laser cut this 30mm diameter circle as a mirror!

-At the same time, i did another board that is supposed to work with 2 ultrasonic sensors, I hope it works!

Tuesday 5-June-2018

I did program for the use of both ultrasonic sensors, just to get something on the serial monitor, and i got them to work. here is a result

This is also when i noticed i forgot to add 4 pins on the board to connect 2 VCC's and 2 GND's, but i got away with it and powered them from an arduino mega which has 2 5v female headers. but they both worked so i am practically done with coding the project.

Days After

After the last date, i did regularly work on the final but i was working on it everywhere, and i had lots of trouble with my phone and i kept forgetting to take screenshots, so everything is mixed up below, but i will explain them.

Answering Some Questions in General first

The deadline is the 22nd of June, I dont have anytime left, I finished the final project already, but there few weeks of editing required for documentation, it is not clear sometimes, the assignments say one thing, but then there is some extra work to be done. So i am only left with documenting now. I didnt sleep for the past 32 hours and i am killing myself to document, everyone at the lab is doing the same thing. Staying up has worked so far, just trying to push my limits, i dont wanna late graduate in january we all sacrificed a lot of our time for fab academy, we wanna do it right and do it once and for all so that we can enjoy actually using our skills that we learned so far, and apply them on our own pace and understand some more things in depth.

Project Development Continued

Code

Later on I found the thing i wanted to use for programming the speaker, I found a volume library, i tested it on the arduino and it works, it actually reduces the volume of the speaker. what i had left is just to add the volume code and set it up with the ultrasonic distance measurement so that the distance interacts with the volume, the same with the frequencies.

I did that, on the day of the final because there was no time left anymore. everything went smoothly with the code except the volume library, i couldn't even upload the arduino code with the library included. This is when i had to read more about the library, and i found this.
The link to the library here.

It doesnt work on the attiny84.. so i had to improvise and i had to use the other ultrasonic to do something, i thought about adding delay and pulse the frequencies, that could actually change the pattern in the projection. and that was what i did really fast.

For the delayvar ultrasonic note, you can still use this ultrasonic even without the code, because the other ultrasonic is actually working and it affects the other one, so if you redirect the waves to the frequencies ultrasonic using your hand, it should create something crazy, i tested it and it worked.

The code is simple, i divided the input values of the ultrasonic into 3 categories, the outputs will only be 1,50 and 100, the frequencies ultrasonic code is simples, i just wanted a bigger range of values so i multiplied the distance value and outputed it to the speaker as a tone frequency.

Case

I designed the case to be acrylic at this point because of time limitations. I used fusion, took me a while to test a lot of fittings and strength of the screw holes.

Assembling the case was not hard but boring and unnecessary, too many screws honesly..

This below is basically it.

Balloon

The balloon idea came to after sleep, i swear sometimes your brain works while you are sleeping, i just woke up and had an idea of how it will work! So below is all i needed!

You just pull the balloon over those knobs that holds it tight! it can't losen!

Laser Angler

The laser angler was inspired by the SRM-20, origining the Z-Axis is manual, i thought i can make something similar! at first it was with only 1 screw, then i made 4 because 1 kept failing, just incase because i didnt have time to do it a third time.

This is a 3D print screwed to the Acrylic board, in between are 4 nuts loose in that gap, so i can use them to move freely up and down, the below screws are shorter than the above, that is because i wanted the below screws to angle the laser, and the above screws to hold it tight and keep it from moving or vibrating, i kept the vibration issue on my mind, thank god it didnt vibrate!

3D Prints

For designing this shape i used a different approach than usual, i used planes and sketched different sides, but they all combined when i extruded them. Below are some 3D prints i did and tests.

The Threaded clamp i did in week6 sure did come handy, for some reason i knew it would!

Board

Enlarge the sketch to see it more clearly. Honestly i had the entire sketch on my mind before i put the componenets, i knew it would work and my mind didnt fail me. except for the jumpers, i didnt know what the traces would be ofcourse.

This is the board with wires below. I used ISP header pins for the speaker and the laser, and powering the amplifier, MISO and MOSI pins.

Amplifier

I got an Adafruit TPA2012 2.1W Stereo Audio Amplifier, i went through this tutorial to understand the pinout, i didnt really understand why it worked on R- but i have an idea now, so aside from VDD which is the + and GND -, I had to add another pin to read the tune commands sent from the arduiono. This pinout below will work, it is extremely loud!

Expeirence

Questions to be resolved: The volume, i wanna test the Atmega and try to use the Volume library, i need to change the whole board for that. Another one is can i really program the speaker frequencies so they can create shapes on the wall? maybe i should make this project easier to work with to achieve that goal.
What have you learned? I learned all the courses we studied, a lot of information was injected during this 6 months, i keep repeating this but i did infact learn my human limits, i now have learned about myself more, i know how i can learn and how something is acting as an obstacle to my learning, i learned that i can be almost 100% sure that i will fail.. but with not giving up i can actually achieve and pass, without even feeling it. i learned that i need a little bit of a break after this, not a break from making, but from due dates.

What i learned with this project however? Frequencies i learned that there are digital and analog frequencies, even a couple more, i learned that i need to work on my sketches more, i learned that i can improve a lot in the physical shape of my project, i dont want to use acrylic anymore its faster but i would prefer going slower and having a better look and feel of the projct.

Download Zip files of the project here.
To understand what is in the zip file go to my final page.