Goals for Week 5:
- Make and paint enclosures for RFID tags out of self-drying clay
- Get materials for control panel enclosure
- Mentor feedback sessions (Arielle and Zack)
- Poke Sheiva about space
What We Accomplished & Learned:
Make and paint enclosures for RFID tags out of self-drying clay
Our classmate Sara pointed us towards self-drying clay, which we realized would work great for our RFID tag enclosures because we wouldn’t have to fire it. We ordered a 5lb box from Amazon, and built our RFID enclosures on Monday of this week!
After splitting the block into even pieces (one “stone” was about one tenth of the full block) we began to form it into shapes. We knew we wanted the form of the blocks to feel natural in the user’s hand, and after trying a few different things we settled on oval shaped stone-like pieces.
This process involved forming the round shape, then elongating some regions of it to form the oval. We also used some water on our fingers to smooth out the irregularities on the surface. Although we could not get it perfectly smooth, the slight bumpiness emulates a natural stone even more!
Above is a photo of how we arranged the RFID tag on the bottom along with a magnet, just to give the user a little bit of tactile feedback when they know they place the tag in the right spot to activate the RFID reader. Our enclosure will have a receiving magnet also embedded in it.
Lastly, we left our little RFID stones out to dry overnight! Next steps involve sanding off any rough spots, painting them white, and adding a design on top to indicate which reader triggers which setting in the room.
Get materials for control panel enclosure
We decided to make our enclosure primarily out of wood, with a few other things for detail work. On Tuesday of this week we went to Home Depot to get a piece of thin birch wood. We also went to Michael’s to get decorative paper to diffuse the neopixel light through holes in the wood, along with paint for the enclosure and our RFID pieces. We already had some clear acrylic on hand!
Mentor feedback sessions
This week, we met up with our real mentor for Capstone (the amazing Arielle Hein) and a creative technologist from BLDG 61 (a makerspace at the Boulder Public Library), Zack Weaver. These feedback sessions were very helpful in directing us where to go from here with our project! To document what we discussed and learned in these feedback sessions, we wrote up separate blog posts for them, which can be found here and here.
Poke Sheiva about space
We are getting the the point in our progress where we are ready to start installing our hardware in the space! So we reached out to our instructor Sheiva about getting that confirmed.
Nate and Elsa's Capstone 