Jetha's Graduation Project

Month: May 2025

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Must see blog posts

Demonstration set up

Clear Video Demonstration

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Best Video Demonstration

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Photo of Artwork

It was extremely difficult setting this up at home as while I made sure to have spare components and wires. I didn’t have equipment like a multimeter, soldering iron, programmable dc supply to debug circuits. I had 2 plugs fail on me so I had to plug 2 circuits into my computer which made it hard to make sure the circuits all turned on at the same time. Due it to being a bank holiday weekend also I couldn’t go to uni replace the plugs.

Luckily everything pretty much worked except for the solenoids in user control and one of the servos in time compressed processes. However these are very common problems, throughout this project I’ve had servos fail and the solenoids have been very temperamental. I’m sure there were issues with voltage drop and current draw, this was unavoidable I triple checked and tested the circuits before bringing them home.

In the video it looks like the servos driving the rack and pinions aren’t working. That was not the case they were working but the way that the servos and circuits were fixed in place the servos the rack and pinions didn’t move. Also the cardboard adding extra space between the gear and servo, the screws ended up not gripping onto the gear like they were before. I tried adding hot glue to the screws to hold it to the gears but it didn’t make much difference. Fortunately I do have videos of the user control circuit and mechanisms working.

The mounting for the hardware symbolisation wasn’t exactly as planned but with what I had it is very close. I had the mirror and all the hardware I wanted to display just not the mounting in between that allows you to see the underside.

Also the arrangement is not to scale. The pieces are to scale none of the components or circuits are a prototype. I just don’t have a large enough space to create the walkable layout I planned for.

Overall though the demonstration was a success as the majority of the piece was working as it should.

  • Spatial Organisation ✅
  • Interface Re-mediation ✅
  • Time Compressed Processes ✅ ⭕️
  • User Control❌
  • Hardware symbolisation ✅

Clear Video of Artwork

Best Demonstration of Artwork

Photo of Artwork

Spatial Organisation
Interface Re-mediation
Time Compressed Processes
User Control
Early hardware Dell laptop side
Hardware symbolisation
Recent hardware macbook laptop side
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Construction Supervisor Meetings

Week 20 – Pause in Production

SMART goals for this week

  • Finish circuits
  • Make diagrams for thesis
    • circuit diagrams
    • iteration timelines
  • Make booklet for blog
    • Process for each part

What I did this week

Supervisor Meeting Notes

Thesis

  • Feedback for first draft thesis
    • Remove details of hardware 
    • Beneficiaries
      • Make sure it’s clear how the work addresses them
    • Planning
      • Evaluation of the Moscow and SMART how it helped prioritisation
    • Ideation and conceptual
      • Make clearer of what the process was 
    • Production
      • Make clear what was done and what will be done 
    • Code may not be needed
    • Merge stats and hardware paragraph together
  • Finish circuits film that finish writing and then do housing 

Due to the time left my supervisor advised that I paused production after finishing the circuits to focus on the project report. So, I made some final touches like recutting the racks as there wasn’t enough space for it to slot into it’s holding. Acrylic for the spatial organisation was also cut. I made them slightly bigger than planned to allow for it to be made smaller if need be for the housing construction.

The pause in production was also caused by a delay on Monday as the physical computing lab was closed the whole morning for filming. I was supposed to finish the circuits in the morning and go to the prototyping lab for the housing in the afternoon. But ended up working on finishing the circuits until closing.

I’m going to make a demonstration video with the circuits in case I can’t do the housing before the deadline. So, I also cut out 45cm x 45cm cardboard squares to mount the circuits onto.

I brought all the circuits home so, I could set up the demonstration over the weekend. I spent the rest of the working week on finishing and editing the project report.

I also finalised a design for the hardware symbolisation after all the delays

Categories
Construction Supervisor Meetings

Week 19 – Finishing circuits

SMART goals for this week

  • Solder circuits
  • Laser cut parts
  • Call around for circuit boards
  • 3D print buttons and light tubes
  • First draft of thesis

What I did this week

Supervisor Meeting Notes

Thesis

  • Audience research 
    • Could be merged with beneficiaries 
    • Show in the development what changes were made for the audience
  • Conclusion 
    • The project and its future 
  • Made circuit for spatial organisation
    • The circuit didn’t work I’m not quite sure why.
  • Soldered LED Matrix and circuit
  • Laser cut and tested gear and rack. I think it’s catching because it’s not fixed in place. If it is the gears than the teeth just need to be sanded down a bit more
  • 3D print buttons and light tubes.
    • The buttons need to be sanded and painted but that can happen at the end
  • Got help for the spatial organisation circuit
    • I booked a meeting with Tom who helped me figure out how to make circuit work and made this schematic for me to follow.
  • Handed in round 2 form for the exhibition
  • Make user control circuit
    • soldered LEDs together
  • Got recommended to use servo driver to only use one arduino
  • Couldn’t get code to work together
  • Got old DELL laptop from mum
  • 9V plug didn’t work with solenoids causing them to be a bit faulty when in a certain position but I got a 12V plug
  • Struggled to get a hold of the charity that were going to help me get circuit boards
    • Called my laptop repair guys they have a laptop with no harddrive for £30
  • Undid my old MacBook Pro 2019 laptop
  • Figured out why user control circuit didn’t work
    • the one solenoid that wasn’t work was because it was in a faulty pin on the board
    • Moved LEDs to analog for brighter LEDs
    • Zeyu helped merge code and also showed me how to not use delay
    • the one solenoid stopped working when I put them in the strip board. I think it might be because the breadboard has resistance whereas the strip board doesn’t. Hopefully I just need to add some resistors in the circuit like I did with the spatial organisation
  • I did a draftish of my thesis so I’m up to the production part.
Categories
Construction Supervisor Meetings Technician Meetings

Week 18 – Starting Construction

SMART goals for this week

  • Start construction whether it’s circuits or housing
  • Write beneficiaries
  • Write draft of wall text

What I did this week

Supervisor Meeting Notes

Thesis

  • Detailed Blog, Thesis summarises
  • Literature Review
    • Reason for choosing medium by excluding another medium
      • doesn’t need to be back up by evidence
    • Inspiration for the piece
  • 50% research 50% process
    • Iterations
      • Whole piece
      • and document the individual in the blog
    • Financial reasons for doing things a certain way is fine
  • Separate weekly posts and extra detail
  • laser cut test gears for user control slider and trackpad mechanism out of acrylic.
  • Meeting with Alex
    • Alex is the prototyping technician. We went over some of my designs and he said that I would need to make the circuits first before making the housing for them to go in. I’m thinking of making one circuit and housing at a time.
  • Meeting with Sarah
    • Had a meeting about the exhibition. They need to see pictures of what’s been made, a draft of the wall text and be notified of any changes that have been made. I wasn’t expecting this I was hoping to work on my thesis writing over the weekend.
  • buy hamster wheels, solenoids
    • I had to buy an extra solenoid as CCI didn’t have anymore available. I also bought the hamster wheels. They look good, i’ll need to ask Alex what the best way to fix them to the servos.
  • test button 3d printing
    • I did a test of the button cap for the user control box. the hole that the solenoid is supposed to go through doesn’t fit. So I’ll have to make it bigger in the model before printing again.
  • bought the acrylic
    • I decided on the fluorescents as they let light pass through them the best and the colours worked nicely together. The red and orange are quite similar. But I’ll use them for the smallest panels as they’re on either side of the piece so I’m hoping they’ll look different enough if they’re not next to one another.
    • I also bought 2 sheets of clear frosted for light diffusing the spatial organisation box and interface re-mediation.
  • Started soldering spatial organisation
  • Thesis writing
    • I did a draft of the beneficiaries
  • drafting wall text
Categories
Prototyping

Week 17 – Final circuit testing

SMART goals for this week

  • Rewrite introduction
  • Laser cut parts to prototype a box for figuring out dimensions
  • Test COB strip light with arduino
  • Figure out the “wheel” part for time compressed process box
  • Figure out Interface remediation box
  • Figure out dimensions for user control box

What I did this week

I rewrote the introduction with the new structure.

I accidentally missed my supervisor meeting this week.

I laser cut some of the parts. I didn’t get to finish cutting the light blocker parts for the spatial organisation box.

I tested the COB strip lights they work perfectly.

However, the minimum strip size is 5cm so I need to resize my lights so that they’re divisible by 5.

In my initial drawing I drew wheels for the time compressed processes. However these were just placeholders while I considered what should help represent time compressed processes. The wheels don’t work as they don’t really have any relation to time, processes or compression. It would also be difficult to see the differences in speed when they’re spinning, also not very visually interesting in comparison to the other boxes. Because the time compression part is being represented by the servos spinning at quick and slow the “wheels” need to represent the process part.

I’m using the visuals of windows pill shaped buttons, and sliders from GUI perhaps I can use a loading circle. Maybe using something similar to the double wheel mechanism used in paper mechanisms. The only thing is it’s quite flat and loading circles are for when computers are conducting a process it doesn’t include the processes that the user does.

I had a thought maybe a hamster wheel. They’re immediately recognisable, they spin and most importantly would clearly represent an organism doing a process. I could get different sizes to represent the different lengths of processes. I can get them in clear plastic and use glass paint to keep them transparent and unify them as I’ll need to get different brands in order for them to be different sizes. Perhaps I can put a ping pong ball inside them to help show the differences in speed.

Tracing paper test for light diffusion

I made a box to test the COB lights with different acrylics and frosted material to diffuse light

I made a blender model to figure out the dimensions for the user control box. I’ve figured out this will be the deepest box so the depth of the boxes should be 5.5cm.

I used illustrator to figure out the spacing on the front panel. I would ideally like more sliders and buttons but they wouldn’t fit.

user control: Gears and racks to test
user control: light for trackpad test
Interface remediation: testing circuit for addressable LED strip

I got some addressable LEDs to make a matrix for the interface remediation as I couldn’t find a big enough screen that was also square. I was having some issues with powering it until I realised the addressable LEDs I got don’t have capacitors built in so I’ll have to add it to the circuit.


I emailed a charity who are willing to help with the project.