In Fall 2021 I was in a unique position as a Student LA of 6.810 Engineering Interactive Technologies (linked), the undergraduate class taught by the HCIE lab at MIT. I simultaneously took the class for credit and assisted students during class hours, office hours, and attended staff meetings to improve the course in the future. Here is a selection of class projects completed over the semester as lab exercises and a final project.
Lab 1-4 - Inkjet Printed Music Card with Printed Touch Buttons
I designed this project after an Otomatone instrument for the graphical side. In Illustrator, I designed the pattern for the inkjet printer to deposit a layer of silver conductive ink on specially coated paper. From there, connections to an ESP32, an Arduino sketch utilizing the CapacitiveSensing library, and Processing enabled a functional music card that can pause/play, cycle through three set music tracks, and adjust the volume with the slider.
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Lab 5-8 - Mug with Sprayed Electroluminescent Display and Printed Temperature Sensor
The class had a day spraying layers of copper, dielectric, and phosphorus inks from Lumilor on conductive film to create electroluminescent displays. From there, I designed a temperature sensor to be printed with the inkjet printer similar to the previous lab. This setup was wrapped around a mug and wired to the ESP32 and a step-up converter for the display, then coded in the Arduino IDE to blink slowly if the mug is too hot.
Unfortunately the display could not be brighter as we were restricted to working with low amperage for safety. Also of note: all of my displays were sprayed correctly (expected success rate 50%) and worked well to the extent that extras were given to those with nonfunctional displays.
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Lab 9-12 - Interactive Lamp
This lab required modeling a lamp base in Blender, 3D printing, sewing together a lampshade with conductive thread buttons, and additional capacitive sensing connections to the ESP32 to control the color behavior of an LED strip inside. Finished video below:
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First "homework" - laser-cut business card. I added an NFC tag that links to this portfolio site when tapped with your phone.
