This week’s activities:

• With 2 cubes now complete, I am delivering them to local designers to test their interaction and potential future use.
• Working on interviewing techniques and questions that I will be asking. I’m video recording the interviews to be used for videos to support my final paper.
• Writing initial drafts for final paper…

After midway critique:

• Traveling to Stockholm and Århus for additional testing, along with testing more local designers and “people on the street”.
• More writing and editing video…

Some photos from recent prototype building. In case you are wondering, I ran cords out of my 4th floor apartment into the courtyard so the apartment wouldn’t smell like burnt wood/metal/plastic.

Cords out the window.

All pieces inside each cube.

Cubes drying after being glued.

Circuit board with touch sensor and LEDs.

Final assembly of internals (button stand and cube in background).

My initial sketches, based on component sizes, showed a cube that would need to be approximately 7 cm square. I would then have enough room for an Arduino Pro board, 3-AA batteries, QT110 chip, RGB LEDs, and enough open air that the LEDs would be able to spread the light in the cube. I had a prototype cube laser cut at 1scale1 to use while figuring out component placements and PCB board sizes. Once all the pieces for inside the cube are determined, I will have 3 final cubes laser cut, with all the necessary holes for switches cut out as well.

Hightlights:

• “How to diffuse an LED” instructables article, showing how to sand the outside of an LED for better diffusion. I’m using this method because it doesn’t decrease the brightness too much while still nicely mixing the RGB LED.
• Turkish Delight boxes make a great way of organizing all the pieces I need for each cube!
• My original intent was to etch my own PCB design to speed up the cube construction process. I’m not currently familiar with the Eagle PCB design software, and it is shorribly difficult to learn, so I am opting to just use simple “swim lane” prototyping boards.

Almost all of this will go in the cube.

Proto board will be attached to top of Arduino.

Small board to capture "button press" state.

Sanding RGB LED for better color mixing.

Inside cube, with proto board, Arduino, and battery pack.

Inside cube with button in place.

Cube with all components.

Sketch for layout of components and circuits.

Collecting components for each cube.

My initial electronics design made use of a very small code library that would allow me to sense the touch of the button. This method did not require any additional hardware and used only a small amount of code to detect the touch. (See photo above) It is a great piece of code and only requires connecting a single wire to a single digital pin on the Arduino.

However, this method did not work for the level of control that I need for my cube. My basic debugging showed that the touch is being consistently detected, but the detection cycles quickly between “touch” and “no touch”. For my cube, I need to be able to detect when a finger is touching the button for more than 1.5 seconds, an action I’m calling a “hold”. This “no hardware touch detection” would cycle between “touch” and “no touch” so quickly when my finger was “holding” on the button, that I wasn’t able to accurately interpret the “hold” action.

I instead moved towards a “hardware required touch detection”… (see video)

The button touch is now being detected by the Quantum QT110 QTouch Sensor IC (chip). Only a simple setup is required, connecting the chip to power, ground, a capacitor to filter out noise, a wire that will be touched, and one digital pin on the Arduino to receive the HIGH/LOW output signal. The good thing about using the chip, is that it does the touch processing for me and outputs a simple HIGH/LOW signal to the Arduino, and also allows me to detect the “hold” action! Integrating this chip to the electronics was almost too easy. The only custom wiring I did was to lengthen the “auto timeout” from 10 seconds to 60 seconds. I changed one wire from power to ground for one pin on the chip to achieve this.

Functionality so far:

• button press (red light on)
• tap button touch (blue light on, repeats number of taps)
• hold button touch (blue light, cycles brightness up and down)

This blog will be the central location for everything related to the progress of my thesis project… what am I doing each day, what am I researching, what physical prototypes am I building, and what is the progress of this short 4 month project.

I urge you to also follow my twitter feed too, which will include short summaries of my blog posts: @stackedui

Please comment whenever you feel the urge to! I am looking forward to feedback on everything I do and share with you here. This is my first thesis-type project, or, a project of this magnitude. I have high hopes for myself in what I want to achieve, in what I want to discover, in what I want to build, and in how this will affect my future jobs and passions.

Recent weather in Malmö, though, it has been snowing for the last 4 days: