Here is the PCB, fresh from Advanced Circuits. I threw it together and mocked it up with the battery from sparkfun for size. It looks like it’ll be fine. For scale, I measured it against my thumb. It’s a little thicker than I’d like, as I’m thinking about casting a resin box for it (probably not in time for the thesis presentation, more likely for the show), and the size may make it kind of unwieldy for a pocket. Otherwise I’m pretty happy with it.

The last couple days I’ve been doing some writing of the thesis paper. Tomorrow, I debug the xbee circuits with the new PCB controlling them, and hopefully plan out how I am going to build the insecurity prosthesis that has me kind of stymied at the moment. Triage time!

Also, this is a really nice review of the new Iron Man movie, talking about a lot of the same stuff that I’m working through as I write. Zeitgeist?

Over the weekend, I put together an early outline for the kinds of things I want to cover in my thesis paper. It needs another revision, and will undoubtedly be edited down for scope as I work. In this case, I tend to go too large in what I want to address in my work, and will probably want to focus more literally on the projects and interactions that I am building rather than writing a research paper in and of itself. There’s time for that stuff later. The outline is here.

After re-stringing the anxiety prosthesis, i worked on making an PCB design for the body component of the alienation prosthesis. I wanted something pocket sized so that you could keep it with you at all times. I figured a key chain would be a nice object to make, so I kept it pretty small. This design measures in at a little over 2 inches by 1 inch and maybe a half inch thick. It’ll use a flat lithium polymer battery to give power, and has a tiny switch so that it can work during a presentation and not be out of juice. For today, I’m working on a final debug of the electronics in the alienation prosthesis, and in the evening I’ll be moving into making a final prototype of the insecurity prosthesis.

the last couple of days I have been working really hard to try to finish the anxiety prosthesis in time for my presentation in class today. Here’s link dump of my progress. Generally, I put it all together, moving from sewing the two pieces together to screwing them together, adding grommets to route the bunches of thread that will control the hackles into, replacing the pulleys with very tall eyelets, and making eyelets that will route the thread over the shoulders into the grommet holes. Overall, it’s been pretty successful, but needs some fine tuning to have it work well while being worn. I like the action and motion a lot though. Video is coming.

Bonus shot of me testing the fit in the bathroom.

finished the sewing up of the boxes. took some glamour shots. The next step is to make a pocket-sized controller for the xbee and then it’s done! whew!

(besides calibrating and testing the lighting and stuff like that, but i want to have my little victories)

Today felt pretty good. I cast a new, thin layer of silicone for the top of the alienation boxes and sewed it on. Then I put together a bunch of the pulley wheels and attached them to the back of the anxiety prosthesis.

I took a break from the anxiety prosthesis to try stitching up the boxtops for the alienation prosthesis today. It’s pretty tough. I have a decent stitch going, but the thickness of the silicone makes it hard to do around all of the sides. Spending like 6 hours for one side of one box in the end is not very encouraging. I’m thinking of making new, thinner casts for the boxtops.

Today I finished sharpening the tool to cut out the shapes for the anxiety prosthesis. I got a whetstone, and went to town. I have a newfound respect for the skills necessary to do that kind of thing–keeping the blade straight enough to sharpen over the course of maybe a hundred strokes while trying to ensure that the blade isnt curving or getting any part of the edge off of the surface is tough.

In any case, I punched out the hackles and trimmed them off with an xacto knife. Now I’m in the middle of assembling the hardware to eventually control them. As usual, here are some pictures:

Today I demolded the skin from the second round of painting on silicone to the plaster cast. Here are some photos of the first result and some in progress shots of the second.

I also got some aluminum and made a tool for cutting out the hackles from the second skin, and marked approximately the layout of where they will go on the silicone.

Over the last two days, I’ve been working on making the silicone layer that will form the outer layers of the anxiety prosthesis. Operating on the excellent advice of Evrim Sahin, I brushed layers of silicone onto the plaster cast of the mannequin’s torso that I made earlier. It was kind of slow, messy, harrowing going. I wasn’t sure if the result would be very worthwhile, as every layer that I added on made weird looking ridges and drips in the silicone. Ultimately, after about 4 or so layers, I peeled it off of the mannequin and was astonished at the pretty decent quality of the casting. The part of it that was against the plaster ended up with a really nice, fleshlike texture, if a little bit problematic in places.

What I am going to do now is take the plaster cast, make another layer of plaster bandages as smooth as I can in order to make a somewhat larger and somewhat more consistent outer layer of silicone. I need two layers of silicone because one will be the base and another will be the layer that the hackles will be cut from. At this point, I’m really optimistic about how this piece will turn out.

This week’s theme is “oh man I really need to get on with building a mold and getting some casting done for the anxiety prosthesis, allegedly the centerpiece of my thesis work.” in the spirit of the theme, I got in today and build a jig that I will be doing the mold pour into. It’s ineterior dimensions are 2 feet square by one foot tall (approximately), meaning that I’ll need around four cubic feet of plaster to fill it. This mold is going to be pretty complicated. At least, it’ll be in three layers, in order to let me release silicone from both the front and the back of the shoulders, with probably around four pieces in the middle layer to let me release the top of the shoulders cleanly.

I’ve never made a large scale, remotely complicated mold before, so I’m pretty intimidated, but also fairly excited. I’ll do some research into the material to use and talk with Peter Mendelson, who teaches the Materials and Building Strategies course at ITP before I begin to pour. With that in mind, I think that the next step is for me to get my hands on some material to build the positive of what I want to cast in silicone on the cast of the mannequin’s back.