I hate Mae. She inspired me to be productive this Christmas by posting her new Deviant Art drawing stuff. It’s pretty cute actually and you can find it HERE. So I took one of my old doodles in school and colored it in Photoshop.

So here’s a before and after pic. It’s pretty much the same except no freckles. Yes, I do take notes. Those are guidelines for testing your prototype with test subjects. I drew the girl laughing because the prof mentioned to ‘look at user’s reactions’. The girl on the left is doing a WTF reaction.

I’m at home in Manila for the holidays and my friends are MIA so this is what I’ve been working on late at night when I should have been partying or something. Am I that pathetic? Do I have to beg someone to take me out?

I’m back in the Philippines for Xmas so I am now bored enough to post a new blog… actually, there’s a party later but this can be a quickie.

So LITZO was a project for IAT 336 that I did with Derek, Manuel and Joel. For this one, we had to make lamps using LED’s and the laser cutter or 3d printer at school. Inspired by Tetris, our idea was to create 5 tetris shapes for our lamp. Each piece would be made of assembled acrylic puzzle pieces lit up by LEDs. The cool thing about our idea was the “switch” to turn it on: you turn it on by stacking them. How? The current will run through each piece by magnets. Cool.

PROCESS

Here’s how we did it. First I drew the shapes out in vector. This took a while since a made a little boo boo with our first set. Then we took the shape into SolidWorks to see what it would look like in 3d, if the pieces actually FIT (since the boo boos didn’t). Then they were cut. It was cool watching the laser burn through making shapes but it stank like a mofo. Joel was our electronics guy since Derek and I had no clue how it would work. The pictures show the magnets soldered onto wires, and that’s just a bit of what we needed. We experimented with different adhesives when puttin the shapes together. We used this chemical that melts the plastic and dries up for all the corners of the puzzle pieces. For reinforcement, we used stinky epoxy inside.

RESULT

Here it is! I’m glad that the acrylic we picked out was that lovely white color. It was opaque enough for the LEDs to shine but still hide all the wiring and glue. The pictures show them all stacked up and now I wish I took pictures of them individually.

And that’s what I do in school. Tadaaaa! Wait for the process video coming up by Derek.