2. Principles and Practices

Requirements:

• Plan and sketch a potential final project

Final Project

The main things for my final project that I was to work on currently involved planning out what the project will look like, its functionality, who may use it, and the weeks that I will have to incorporate during the creation of the project.

Since a young age, I have been skiing with my family at various resorts across the Appalachian and Rocky Mountain ranges. While skiing, I have wiped out and crashed many times, sometimes leaving my supplies scattered around the ski slope. This idea of losing your items in the snow made me come up with the idea of a ski helmet that has multiple built-in sensors to direct you back towards your lost items. I chose to design it around finding gloves, as I believed it would be additonally interesting if I worked to create custom gloves that fit my hands and have spots for where the sensors could be located. The main design process behind creating the project will involve creating the helmet and gloves to fit my personal measurements, creating the circuitry to be insdie the top of the helmet, and connect those programmed boards to different displays and indicators on the helmet.

The first step I took was to map out what part of my project I would be doing during each week of Fab Academy. I created a Google Spreadsheet to record my ideas about what I might be able to do each week, and I updated this spreadsheet as I knew more about what I wanted to do for my project and how each week would go.

I then created sketch of what the project would look somewhat like.

After speaking with my instructor, he suggested that I add real time sensors for other aspects of skiing, including an speed dectector and an angle sensor. I plan to integrate these and might forego the other distance sensors in favor of a design fully oriented around the helmet.

Adding back to this week after having not worked on it for a significiant amount of time, I have realized that I want to fully focus on the helmet itself. I plan to make a frame for the helmet using the CNC machine, use the 3D printers to manufacture the outer and rounded shell of the helmet, as well as potentially some innard parts, use the laser cutters to create simple and direct wire-holding mechanisms, and different sensors for skiing-related ideas.