24Eng Portfolio Year 08

Before the blog
First year
Second year
Third year
Fourth year
Fifth year
Sixth year
Seventh year
Eighth year<<<<<<<
Ninth year
Tenth year

I have a list of my Press STUFF.

I found inexpensive hitch pins, but their typical split-ring wasn't very attractive, so I designed some simple T-handles that would fit at the end. With tapped holes and color-matched machine screws, they look beautiful.

My resin printer is terrific, but sometimes I need to harden liquid resin on the surface or tack a few pieces together, so I bought a UV laser module and printed a platform to hold a switch and battery. My UV pen was like a soldering iron for printer resin.

I moved to a new house, so I needed a new place to record. I converted a spare closet with egg-crate foam and some acoustic panels. This time, I got creative with the door and taped foam to a couple of pieces of red foam board.

My Back of the Hand Keyboard was a step toward practical wearable computing as an input device that wouldn't be in the way during ordinary life. It started as a way to trigger tasks on my work computer, but I had to simultaneously hold an electrical probe or screwdriver, so I put the buttons behind my fingers.

The 24EngSilentKeyboard has an uninspiring name, but it doesn't have any moving parts, so I don't get a sound blip when I touch a key to start an audio recording. The keyboard was a quick project to solve a minor problem, and I got to work with inexpensive touch sensors.


During recording sessions, I repeatedly pressed R to begin recording in Audacity and SPACE to stop, but I had to press the keyboard delicately to keep the noise down. I installed a switch into a salvaged bottle with a microcontroller to emulate a keyboard. When I depressed the button, it sent R and SPACE when I released. I could hold it behind my back for extra silence.

I envisioned a train of lunch boxes containing unique music-generating components, which I could insert or remove at will. Each component would communicate via old-school MIDI in series and convey the previous box's data with a synth at the end to tie all my instruments together. The first piece of that puzzle was a miniature box to generate a timing signal.

Next in the series of lunch box music was a drum machine, which I wanted to build for a long time. I installed the components in a Dungeons and Dragon lunch box which could still close with everything inside, so it was portable! I ran a TikTok channel for this instrument paired with the timer panel.

I designed a box that played melody instruments and put it into a Big Hero 6 lunch box. I planned to revise my design to make it easier to produce a handful to add up to five instruments but stopped after the first because I was distracted by running the TikTok channel.

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