This week I attempted to make an attaching piece for my iPhone that would amplify the volume. You might be familiar with the amplifying trick of placing the speaker area of your phone in a cove-shape space (cupped hand, or, just a cup). The design I came up with references to seashells, and I’m curious to find out whether or not some of the properties I hypothesize are related will indeed change the quality of […]
In this week’s exercise, I experimented with depth of focus and polarization. For depth of field, we learned that the amount of focus in the depth of field is determined by the aperture setting. The smaller the aperture the longer the range of focus. So, I took two photos, the first is with the smallest aperture on my camera (I believe it was 4.6): In the second photo, the aperture is completely open (29): For […]
Over the course of the semester, I had the great pleasure of working on a fantastic assistive tech project, in collaboration with the Byun Lab @ NYU and three other partners: Heather Campbell, Helen Carey and Celine Wu. Together, we continued a project which had initially started two years ago, developing a tool for speech therapists and their patients which will help people who have a difficult time pronouncing the “R” sound. In a nutshell, this is done […]
JavaScript was a brand new language for me 7 weeks ago. Up until then, I knew how to read HTML and edit a bit in CSS. Today, I feel a lot more confident both with Markup and CSS, and have a new friend in my development toolbox named JavaScript. JavaScript is great, but not that simple. I find it will take more and more practice until things really start to sink in. So, before I […]
Silophon from Dalit Shalom on Vimeo.
This week (which was our final week working on the project!) we went through some obstacles with the sound. Along the way we had proposed various ideas to each other: How about trying to store the sound files on the Arduino Mega and playing it from there? We tried that but for some reason we were getting an awful digital sound (although the bright side was that there was some kind o communication going on). […]
This week we dedicated our time to working on the final fabrications of the Silophon. We were a bit OCD with our measurements (to the millimeter!) so assembling the pieces at the end kind of felt like assembling furniture from Ikea. We learned to use a lot of scary tools and how to avoid cutting fingers. Here’s a glimpse at our process in the Shop: We started out by cutting the base of our Silophon. […]
This week, we started building and assembling our final version of the Silophon. We started out by mapping, measuring and calculating the sizes of the different pieces we will need to build and construct. After that, we discussed the various materials we would like to use and where we should buy them. For example, we thought the mallet used for hitting the keys should probably be made of rubber and then wrapped in felt. Over […]
This week we setup our circuit, tested the sound and made sure our idea works. Setup How it Works R2R Resistor Ladder The resistor ladder is essentially a series of voltage divider so the input closest to the ground adds the least to the output (it’s the least significant bit), and the input closest to the output adds the most to the output (it’s the most significant bit). Here is a video demonstrating each input individually, […]
Poor design and user experience is all over the web. Especially when it comes to products and websites catering to special needs or requirements. I love to cook, and often I get inspired by ideas or recipes that I find online. However, I have quite a few friends who are allergens that need some kind of middle-filter when looking for recipes. From the quick research I did, these are some of the websites or engines […]