I recently completed the final project of my year-long challenge to make a project a month from 15jul20 to 15jul21. This marks the end of my second year of making, counted from when I had to do a project for work and resurrected a Arduino Uno I had in the closet for 10 years (I never figured it out the first time). And by making I mean chips, circuits, PCBs, 3D printing, and the like [I’ve always been creative making and designing things, but not the level of these past two years (sort of)]
Anyway, I chose the challenge as a constraint – both to hold me to making 12 projects, and to time constrain things so that things just had to get done.
Well, things were not that simple.
Life intrudes
Before I list the projects I did and provide some commentary, I will admit that I did not keep to the schedule of constraining the projects from the 15th of one month to the 15th of the next. Already with the second project, timelines slipped. And then a death in the family (my father) had me skip two months – yeah, I had other things to focus on – and was subsequently affecting the amount of time I had during the rest of challenge period. Some months I would go a week or two not touching a single project.
At the same time, the projects kept me going after my father passed, and also engaged my mother (she’s a long-time maker, very creative and totally grokking what I do, providing great advice on project design – really). So while on the one hand parts of our lives were up-ended, the projects also helped us move on after the up-ending.
But none of this is any excuse. The whole part of a challenge such as this one is to provide concrete achievable goals, constraints, and urgency. Arising from that, we learn about ourselves, our materials, and our limits.
Gaming life
For every project, I was trying to insert some meaning, or trying to make a concept tangible. Not sure I hit the mark each time, but the intent was there.
My first project was the Multi-mode Game of Life. This one was meant to show aspects of contagion (it was the Summer of Covid) and #BLM. As a bonus, I whipped up a Game of Life: Contagion Mode, Rose Garden Massacre Edition, inspired by the disastrous super-spreader event during the nomination of the last Supreme Court Justice.
Slowing down time
Next came Seeing Thru Time, inspired by the closeness of Jupiter, Saturn, and the 4th of July full Moon last summer (the three, including a full Moon, were up again last night, tho not as close). The goal was to show how long it takes for light to go from the Sun to these celestial bodies and then back to Earth. I thought it was cool, even if most people didn’t. For me at least, this was the first one to hint at the sublime – awakening a sense of fearsome wonder for the universe.
The funny thing is that I really don’t have anywhere to put it, so this project has inspired me to rearrange my workshop for more permanent installations.
Spooky
After that, I wanted to do something for Halloween, perhaps something scary that I could hang for trick-or-treaters. And being a bio-geek, I knew I wanted to do a virus.
For this project I knew I wanted to dodecahedron or icosahedron. And fed by a ton of LEDs and resistors I had lying around, I made a spiky model with animated LEDs (over 60!).
Quite fun.
Pausing
And then my dad died. There was only so much attention I could give while I dealt with the aftermath, I ended up skipping the next two months of projects. Indeed, those two months were actually planned to be a two-part project around book making. The first month was supposed to be print making, the second 3D printing a book. I had just started the test prints. But really, I could tell that my mind wasn’t up to working on the projects. There’s only so much attention one has, and my mother and family definitely took precedence.
Picking up on the next measure
That pause took me to mid-December, ready to start what would have been the sixth project, but was now the fourth. This one came out of a zany idea that someone with one watch knows the time, but someone with, uh, five, is never sure. The idea (“For All Time”) was to set up different timepieces and watch the times deviate.
This was an elaborate project, forced me to up my skills in Fusion 360, work with stepper motors for the first time, and fill every single pin possible in my TinyPICO. I was also pleased to see the project get called out in the Adafruit Blog (*blush*).
Alas, everything worked well except the stepper motor. That is, the holder for the stepper motor failed, so the whole winding mechanism was useless (for the bottom middle watch). And then I ran out of time to make it better.
One thing I haven’t said until now is that one of the watches was my father’s (the one with the white face), that I took off him when they took him away. So, one thing I want to do, now that the challenge is over, is go back and fix the winding mechanism and get this contraption turned on again.
Being cheeky
The watch project was to show that time could seem arbitrary. Serious stuff. In contrast, the next project was all cheek.
Early this year, COVID vaccines were all the rage (not sure why they no longer are, considering). My extended family members were all getting their Fauci Ouchys. Therefore, I wanted to make a range of blinkybadges for them to proclaim their vaccinated state.
Alas, I only made one of the designs. Though I did learn heaps from the process – new chip, my own artwork, hot air gun soldering of SMT – among other things.
A quite interesting project
My father was old, and in those final years I was thinking a lot about death, dying, and immortality. I was also thinking how I could express such concepts in a tangible way. What I came up with was recording the life of an EEPROM as it dies.
The project was called “Death and Deathlessness“, a saying out of the Lord of the Rings (indeed, in college, I wrote a short story on the topic). Deathlessness, rather than immortality, was a key concept in the LotR.
The project, inspired by others who would take an EEPROM to first failure, was to take every address on the EERPOM to failure, record it on the way, and the replay it. My first question was if the replaying was life, or what, if it was the exact same as the life of the EEPROM.
Truth is stranger than fiction. The damned thing ran so long before the first failure that I kept verifying if the code was right (it was). I’m not going to say more here as I did some forensics I want to share in a separate post. Interesting stuff.
Pretty pictures
End of April, we were heading to graduation season. Me, in all my wisdom, decided to make something image-based for graduations in the family. I recalled lithophanes and found a really helpful website for me to create the files to use in 3D printing.
This project was really fun, the 3D printer working long hours every day. And this projects is one of the rare ones my family has asked for more. Tho, I realized when the lithophanes were done, that the graduates wouldn’t want a photo of themselves, so I gave the framed lithophanes to their mothers. Haha.
I have a few frames left over so will definitely get back to these to make more, especially to complete the one of my mom holding my dad’s hand, shown here.
Another unfinished project
The next one was one I had been pondering since I first thought of the challenge: “what does Dignity look like?” And throughout the year, I was nowhere near getting that answer, until one day it clicked. Alas, in the time I had, I was able to work on the electronics and the code, but got bogged down with the enclosure, which is instrumental to delivering the experience.
I’m not going to say more here, as I will be going back to this one, as this one is important to me.
Blinkenbugs
One other project that I was excited to get to, but that had to wait for the start of Summer, was around fireflies. The original project concept was some funky Boldport artsy freeform and PCB type creation that could simulate firefly flashes. But due to time, travels, and the chipocaplypse, I instead decided to use mostly what I had already.
Soon after I wrote the post on the project, I did manage to attract some fireflies. Quite thrilling. But more importantly, the project had me (and at times, other family members) out most nights, marveling at nature’s light show (that fearsome wonder of nature, again).
Tree of Life
After that, I reached the final project, the Tree of Life. Not to be just some lit up image, I decided to add a twist, a twist that I hope makes one think of what dementia looks like.
Also, it just is one wicked beautiful build. Which got me thinking: the 3D model was purchased and I riffed off of it (multi-color, mounted, animated). At first I felt awkward mentioning where I got the model (folks would go ‘wow’ and I quickly let them know it wasn’t me who did the model). But then I realized that remixing things is OK, kinda like with my COVID decoration (also a purchased and modified model).
Indeed, if there’s one big thread through my past year is that so much of what I made is based on the genius of others and I’m just a humble remixer, seeing new ways to bring all those bits and bobs together into something that means something to me, and hopefully to others. While the challenge forced me to go in and out of projects quickly, it also taught me a wide range of skills that I can now go more deeply into for fuller materialized ideas.
Yeah, that kinda suggests what the next year will be like, haha.
Onto year three.
