11/11 Wednesday - Adobe Illustrator

Today, we spent the entire class working on our class sculpture shapes. However, we did not use AutoCAD to do this. We used a new software, Adobe Illustrator. We learned how to use this software by exploring our options. Our task for the day was to finish drawing our shapes on Adobe Illustrator so that we can print our shapes and get closer to finishing the actual project. It was decided that we would use Adobe Illustrator instead of AutoCAD to fix the scaling problem that many of us faced during a previous class.

Homework that is due next class: Finish drawing your shape on Adobe Illustrator.

Here are some photos from today's class:

This is an example image of what we did today using Adobe Illustrator.

11/5

In class, we worked on printing out our cardboard shapes.  These shapes were all similar, because we had all started with the same shape, and changed parts of it to make it an individual one.  Most of us had a hard time figuring out how to scale our shapes so that it would be 30 cm long.  In most cases, our shapes were at least 80,000 cm long, which was too big to fit onto the cardboard.  After printing out the shapes, some groups realized that their slots were not the thickness of the cardboard, so it would be hard to fit the shapes together.  They also said that some of them had too many slots, making their whole shape easily breakable.  The homework for next class is to get our shapes to exactly 30 cm so we can print it out onto one piece of cardboard.

10/28

In this class we worked on hacking the class shape and our projects. Mr. Neile looked over our sheets of paper with our drawing, materials, and procedure list. He sat down with us one at a time and gave his personal feedback on our direction we are going. We also had to keep track of our gantt chart. We were assigned two pieces of homework: 1. We need to fix our sheet of paper that was handed back 2. We need to checkmark our gantt chart to make sure we are on track to finish.

10/30

Today in class, we learned how to use the Arduino's. Many of our class members had never used arduino's while others have had a little experience with it last class. Our class faced challenges such as programming the gemma which is the device that stores the information and details on what to do. Thus, everyone had to research about how to fix their problems and how to use an arduino. Our class was split into four groupsand two of the groups worked on how to use arduino's and neopixels which are wearable lights while the other two groups worked on creating a "Blink Pattern" with a LED light and the arduino.  However, in the end all of the groups were able to figure out how to solve their problem and were successful.

10/26

Today, we wrote down about our project on a worksheet and started researching and working on our project. We had to sketch what are project would look like and then write down the steps towards our goal.

10/22

Today, we chose to work on one of the four things on the picture below.

The first one was hacking the shape for our class project. 

The second and third one was to start playing around with the arduino hardware and software, for both individual and class project.

The fourth one was to start the preparation for our individual project.

10/16

Today in class we got to find out what shape we are going to be using for our collaborative project. We all brainstormed ideas for what electronics we might want to use on the shape, where we might want to put it and the circuitry. Towards the end of class we also got to find out more about our individual projects and watched some videos about the different tools and topics we can use and focus on. Such as arduinos, milling, neopixels, etc.

Homework: To make a blog post for this week