Since I changed my idea from my initial plan I am a little behind, however I have made some success and countered some potential problems. After looking over a lot of LED Matrices and LCD Screens I chose one of each and ordered them along with a Raspberry Pi Zero. I am still waiting for…

Unfortunately, my biggest challenge this week has been waiting. The electronic parts I ordered for the project still haven’t arrived. They should be here by Wednesday at the latest but that means I haven’t been able to work on the technicalities of the project. Once the parts arrive, I anticipate the hardest part will be…

This week I worked on setting up my EL wires and getting the control board soldered and coded. I thought it was going to be more time consuming but after the initial soldering the rest was fairly plug and play this gave me time to get started on my design. although I am still unsure…

The hardest part of my project so far has been the scaling up of the small aluminum foil tree from last week to a larger tree that will allow for softer bends on the EL Wire, and space for multiple colors to be run alongside. After reading the comments on my previous post, I decided…

For this past week, my goal was to tackle the hardest challenge I knew I was going to encounter with this project, which is CADing the frame for my infinity icosahedron. When it comes to robotics, I’ve always been primarily focused on the coding aspect however I have dabbled in Solidworks / other CAD softwares…

After a long while of waiting my colored gel plastic sheets finally came on Friday. This did not give me much time to mess around with them but did show me some of the issues that I had. Chiefly if you color a white piece of paper with a red mark and put the red…

This week I focused on making the hot air balloons, trying to get the design/colors on the paper to appear, while still letting light shine through. I first began by using my small globes and a paper towel roll to make the shape of the balloon. I then decided to first try with the origami…

The hardest part of my project was making an animated lantern. I started off with the following concept of having a spherical lantern that would have a spinning component within it. I started off trying to emulate a traditional spinning lantern. This involved a rotating drum with images that would spin around a pin in…

This past Friday the paper for my project came in. I don’t know how it happened, but I seemed to have ordered the wrong size. The paper is much smaller than I originally intended. I could have returned the paper in exchange for a larger size but I wanted to get started on the folding…

My primary source of failure throughout this process has been entirely my own doing. Failure through indecision. I am someone who struggles with making decisions relating to nearly anything, so deciding on a path or set of paths to take in relation to this project is not immune. This indecision comes from being non-comital when…

I started off the week by cutting two medium sized triangles and soldering them together. Then I took a bright flash light and shined it through the glass pieces, the results were very underwhelming. The triangular shape was not giving me the shadow patters that I was imagining in my head. Shadows underwater are always…

Proof of Concept: I tested out extending the LED by soldering the LED to some electrical wiring. This video shows that this was a pretty simple task. The solder connection was not as strong as I would like so I taped the wire to the LED as well. I will try to get a better…