Update 04-08: Added section on a bangle.js app I had forgotten, fixed title.

And now, a summary of some of the things I got up to in 2023 that I did not have the time to put on a blog.

Course projects

I spent the majority of my spring semester (20 ects worth) on the course Innovation Project. Here I worked with the Fællessteder project to explore how stewardship and community can be encouraged in local spaces. The aim was to have people in their local areas care for public and semi-public spaces around them as a way of fostering community adhesion. To this end, I explored how physical and virtual spaces connect to become malleable and reproducible: A physical sign for sketching with whiteboard markers connected through qr codes and redirects to persistent online spaces. I ended up producing a pictorial of the design process, a small position statement as an addendum, and a video summarizing the base premise:

The 5 ECTS course Augmented Reality had us develop a small interactive VR game. I ended up doing cannon bowling. Although a fun experiment, the project highlights how occlusion limits the interactive capabilities of marker-based tracking:

Finally, the last 5 ects of my spring semester was spent on the Designing Wearables course, where I created a compression wearable for hugging at a distance. I continued this work through the fall as a 10 ects project course. Seperate post coming soon (tm) on that work.

The remaining time of my fall semester, I created a visualisation of property prices in and around Aarhus for the Data Visualisation course, and experimented with direct, concurrent actuation, temperature measurement and touch sensing of shape memory wire, embedded in a braid to create color+shape changing interactive hair ala HairIO for the Engineering Interactive Technologies course:

Personal projects

A little while ago, as my original Pebble smart-watch was starting to fail, I decided to get a bangle.js 2 watch to replace it. One thing I missed in the switch was a proper agenda to show upcoming events. Over the summer I made an attempt at reproducing the pebble agenda for the platform. Looking through demo videos (my old Pebble was completely gone by then), the animations of the last firmware release are surprisingly complex, with squishy transitions and detailed icon animations. Unable to replicate these completely, I went for something relatively close that would fit the platforms aesthetics and capabilities: (Video on the todo list) For the time spent, I’m pretty happy with the result. Next on the sometime-in-the-future-todo: Greater interactivity with events (select to expand), weather integration, getting other events not from the calendar (like sunrise and sunset times), and further performance improvements if possible. Now available on the Bangle.js App Loader.

As an exercise in CAD of soft materials and draping fabrics, I drew, paper prototyped, and then laser-cut and sew a dress for a mouse:

Note to self: Cotton does not melt. Laser cut edges fray just as easily as scissor cut ones. they need to be sewn in to be usable.

As an exercise during the innovation course, I attempted to live without throwing out food in the trash (The standard practice in cities until recently). This involved setting up small-scale composting. I relatively quickly ran out of space and had to upgrade. I drilled out a builders tub, and laser cut a lid for it from cheap acrylic: In hindsight, that is way too much ventilation. If you want to replicate, just drilling holes in the bottom for the worms is plenty.

Fall 2023 I ran out of 3d printer filament, and ordered some cheap second-grade rolls. They arrived on a rainy morning in nothing but a cardboard box… This gave me a good excuse to purchase a dehydrator and build a filament drying box. The design process turned out more complex than I expected. Meanwhile the dehydrator got to serve its regular purpose in drying several kilograms of apples.

The drying box has space for three 1kg rolls. The axis on which they sit is split into three segments with seperate ball bearings, allowing independent rotation of the rolls. Again in hindsight, I realised the reason most filament holders have turned to resting the roll on its edges instead of through its center hole. To replace a single filament roll, all three must be removed from the box and reinstalled.

Oh also, I converted a js port of oneko to a firefox extension.