Students living away from home often feel disconnected from the experiences and important events that take place in their family's home and in their home towns. These events range from intimate family dinners and holiday celebrations to more public events like festivals and sports matches.
Our concept aims to bridge the connection gap between a student's new place of residence and their homes, in essence bringing their home life into their new lives away. We aimed to create an experience that is powerful, comforting, and non-interruptive so that enhances connection while not distracting from one's day-to-day experience. We wanted the interaction to feel authentic and to coordinate well as a system with our two other products.
We set out to build a picture frame with an LED strip behind the image. The image would show a view outside the windows of the student's home, and the LED light would change its intensity/color based on the weather of the student's hometown. By looking at the picture frame, the student would know what the weather is like in their hometown while they are living away from their home. Through our design and circuit building process, we created a number of iterations, keeping with the original intent of the project while changing the form and some functionality.
Form Progression
As pictured below, our initial concept was in the form of a picture frame, backlit with an LED light. Upon getting feedback and considering the impact of the design, we brainstormed around creating a form that was more representative of 'home' for the user and that had a stronger design element and more dynamic functionality. Our first prototype incorporated motion (a spinning cylinder), different colored light (using plastic colored film), and projection. These additional components made for a higher impact product; however, we still wanted to improve upon the form from an aesthetic and functional perspective. Aesthetically, we wanted the form to be clean while incorporating art from our student's country of origin. We explored doing this through painting and through laser cutting wood and ultimately found that the laser cut wood created a cleaner aesthetic. For our form, we changed the stepper motor rotation axis from a z-axis rotation to a y-axis rotation in order to create a simpler mechanism by which to support the light above the stepper motor.
Building The Circuit
Starting with the breadboard, we added an LED and then the stepper motor and driver. From that point, the team tested the light and realized that it was not strong enough to project onto a wall. We then replaced the LED with a neopixel; however, this solution did not work either. We considered using an 8x8 LED matrix but realized that given our desired functionality, a light that was consistently on would work just as well. We opted to use a flashlight that was not connected to the circuit. From this point, we removed all lighting components from the circuit. We initially had a button in the circuit to activate the stepper motor; however, for the purposes of the system and demo we opted to control the circuit through a computer instead of a physical button. We tested the functionality of the circuit intermittently to ensure that it worked well in conjunction with the physical prototype.
The team's final prototype included an external light and power source. The motion was created by a stepper motor. As described above, the team iterated, each time ensuring that the design and engineering choices were as simple as possible while still providing the desired functionality. The following summarizes the bill of parts for the circuit and physical prototype, the circuit configuration, and the final code used.
Circuit - Bill of Materials:
Physical Prototype - Bill of Materials:
Integrating with different teams was difficult because we all had different visions and ideas. As we designed, tested, and iterated, it was important to keep communication open between groups to ensure that our updated designs and functionalities worked well in concert with the other prototypes. We found it helpful to create a specific use case and target user that we could reference as we designed to ensure we were solving for the right pain points. We also learned how to integrate a number of new components and processes into our design process.
Learnings
Challenges
Future Iterations
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