I went to blick art after thesis class today and got some sculpting mesh and some plaster bandages. The plaster is for reattaching the shoulder pieces to the back cast. With the mesh, I sketched out a general shape for the insecurity prosthesis. I wrapped it in some fabric that I saw Rory leave on the junk shelf yesterday. After pinning the fabric around the mesh armature, I pinned the heating pad to the underside.

It goes around the neck and shoulders and hangs down onto the chest. It works pretty well, gets nicely warm (even if not very heavy) and hasn’t caught on fire yet, which is a kind of success. Drew Burrows, Kyveli Vezani, Robert Moon, and Rory Nugent were kind enough to model it for me.

I think that what I’m going to have to do is to make a pattern from this shape, and then cast and cut the pattern out of silicone, eventually sewing it together with the ubiquitous red thread. I need to think of something that could fill it that wouldn’t cause a fire or electrocution hazard. Aesthetically, I’d love for it to be really well sealed and to be filled with water, but that would be pretty dangerous with an AC heater involved. Maybe rice or lentils, but that seems to subvert the medical angle. small glass or plastic beads? that seems like it’s getting expensive. Stuff to think about, I guess.

Testing out lighting and situational usage of the alienation prosthesis. I still need to hammer out code for it, but I should be able to demo the lights nicely for my presentation tomorrow morning.

I got another piece of poplar and whipped up a couple of boxes for housing the xbee breadboards. It’s still not working the way I imagine, but the pictures here should be able to give a representative idea of what will happen when I iron out the kinks in the code and circuit.

Ultimately, when the user walks towards the boxes with an xbee transceiver in their pocket, the boxes will dim, and get brighter as he or she recedes. The pictures still have the debug LEDs in place, which will eventually be removed and replaced by a single super bright “warm white” LED.

I went out the other day and bought a poplar board in order to make a kind of platter to present the mechanical prototype of the silicone prosthesis. The swatch was hooked up to servo motors, so I could control the motion and present it in class. I intend to make a couple of what I’ve been thinking about as “finished prototype sketches” that I can use to figure out and present how I want to proceed with this project.

My next step here is to really consider and plan how I am going to make a body cast for the full scale silicone mold moving up to the larger scale molding and casting. For the next couple of days, however, I’ll be working on the electronics that will power my concept for the alienation prosthesis.