Weekend
Over the weekend I went with a group of REU students to the Art Show and to Taste of Bloomington. Afterwards we went to a comedy show with Scott Thompson. On Sunday I got went for a walk,  got some bubble tea, and of course, went to Kroger’s.

Monday
Monday morning all of the REU students assisted with the SOIC summer camp. I taught two groups of campers how to make paper circuits. It was a bit of a challenge to make sure that everyone was engaged and that no one cut the corners of their circuit. Monday afternoon I laser cut the wood version of my box and 3D printed a LilyPad base. Mina and I reviewed feedback from the peer review process, made a table of this feedback, and submitted our paper for the next week as well.

Example Paper Circuit Card

Tuesday
Tuesday morning I realized the the LilyPad base would be very difficult to print because making the pegs narrow enough to fit made them too weak. I decided to solder snaps onto the LilyPad components and then sew the bottom of the snaps with conductive thread to a patch of conductive fabric. This new system would allow the LilyPad components to be removable and used in a sewing machine. I would also color code the top using puffy paint so that circuits would be more obvious. On Tuesday I soldered the snaps and sewed them into a piece of fabric. I also read one of my peer’s papers and wrote down my feedback. Mina and I met with Ben to discuss our progress from the past week and talk about some next steps. We are drafting the findings and discussion sections this week. In our findings we will discuss the exemplar objects we are making and some of the themes we observed in the participatory design videos. We will also compare some themes from our modified participatory design method to the standard as outlined in the literature. 

LilyPad with Snaps

 

Color Coded LilyPad with Snaps

Wednesday
On Wednesday I cut pieces of conductive fabric to add to each of the fabric bases. I sewed to each piece with conductive thread so that it could be used in a sewing machine. I tested the conductivity of the fabric and it appeared to work pretty well with the LilyPad. I also worked a bit more on the paper. Mina and I decided it would be best to add a background section between the related works section and the methods section with information about the observations and survey that Ben did earlier in the research process. We also added more information to the methods section so that our research would be reproducible. On Wednesday afternoon I went to a workshop about networking. I have always been a bit hesitant about networking, even though I know how important it is. After the workshop I feel a bit more confident about networking and have a few ideas about how to approach people. Wednesday evening I worked on building my professional website, twitter, and linkedIn.

LilyPad with Conductive Fabric Strips

Thursday
On Thursday I sewed the pieces together to make a finished circuit and updated the corresponding code.  I also worked on an outline of the findings and discussion section. We are writing findings that should match our contributions paragraph in the introduction. We are discussion the sample prototypes we are making and the iterations we are making on them. Additionally, we are talking about the results from the participatory design workshop. In the afternoon, Ben, Mina, and I did an affinity diagram with quotes from the participatory design videos. It was a bit more difficult to categorize the participant’s ideas than I had expected but we found general ideas regarding health, games, and security, as well as ideas to improve the aesthetics of the items they were already making.

 

Finished Circuit with velcro patches, snap-able LilyPad, color coded pins, and sewing machine enable conductive fabric strips

Friday
On Friday Mina and I met with Ben in the morning to review our work on prototyping and the paper. We talked a bit about improving our current project iterations and making them more modular. I may try to improve the base for the LilyPad components by laser cutting the pieces from wood and soldering or glueing in the snaps and adding in holes that are conductively connected to each snap. Then we had the ProHealth Lab meeting and a Mid-Summer Assessment about the Pro-Health program. For the ProHealth Tea today we had an interesting activity about how everyone starts with a different skill set in life but it is important to understand other’s perspective. After the tea we went to the Data Processing center for a tour of the building and we were able the supercomputer, Big Red II.

 

Big Red II – The Super Computer

Song of the Week