Furnishings and Floorings

Chelsea working on furniture

Everything slides around too much on the foil.

Today we worked more on making furniture and we rethought the whole cardboard flooring idea. As we make more furniture we see that it slides around a lot on the slippery aluminum foil that we put on the cardboard, and that makes it a pain in the neck to play with the layout. Not only that, we also realized that once the top frame is on, it's still really too low. The floor needs to be about an inch higher than the cardboard one we glued in. The Duplo (large Lego) base is too chunky and we don't really want to glue it onto the cardboard or smaller Lego since the surfaces are so nubby.

We decided to try making a few bases with the regular sized Lego and sticking the larger Lego sheets to it. That is going to

A better way

work much better. We can more easily take it in and out of the shell, and more easily attach furniture and Lego people to it. The grooves may also make it easier to wire. We'll see. We experimented with a few different Lego means of holding up the floor and finally found the best one to hold up a sheet of Lego. Art and Andrew went out to Toys-r-Us and got sheets of Lego for the upstairs and downstairs floors. We will re-measure and then see about cutting the Lego sheets to size.


 Going with the Lego sheet floor, we decided to glue the flat Lego

Bedroom set

pieces to the furniture we have already made, and we did the same to the furniture we made today. Chelsea worked on a number of whimsical furnishings using a variety of media. While fishing through vats of Lego (and Bionicles and Hot Wheels here and there) for the base, we also retrieved a good many more Lego people and Lego people parts.

We brainstormed a bunch about behaviors for the dollhouse. Do we want them to be automatic or interactive? How much harder will it be to make them interactive? We know we want lights for the disco and bedroom at least, and Andrew wants to record and

Toilet!

include the sound of bacon sizzling in a pan. Chelsea made a very cute frying pan from some discarded jewelery and a paper clip. She also made a rather amusing toilet - but do we really want toilet noises? And what soundtrack should the disco have? Can people choose tunes? How will the Lego people dance on the platform?

The upstairs is still an issue. The plan is to put the bottom floor in and then measure the distance from the bottom floor to where we want the ceiling to be and then try to take another, more precise measurement of the top floor. The tricky thing is that, because the shell slopes upwards and inwards, the higher we go, the less surface area we will have for the second floor.

 

Various furnishings, now with Lego glued beneath them

Cyber Dollhouse Scratch sketch version 1

Andrew made a Scratch project which will contain the layout and will help us brainstorm more about interactivity.  You can see it here.

 

We're going to Maker Faire!

We submitted our Maker Faire registration and exhibition forms this past weekend and got our acceptance emails. Here is our page on the Young Makers website!

First Floor Going In

It's time to get the first floor in. The measurement isn't perfect, but the shape of the base is super irregular and there are all kinds of bumps and stuff on the base too which makes it so that we have to be raised above it. We tried putting clay on the bumps but it was not really helpful so we used a modified box top and cut it to fit. We decided to have the floors covered in aluminum foil for a cool, metallic look which goes with the cyber theme.
Chelsea created furniture, decorations and made walls with LEGO. Alfia made a pi bench with playdoh and keyboard keys. Andrew worked on the flooring and modeled Chelsea's homemade disco ball. Lots of glue gun action went down.

Chelsea glues glass to a mini globe earring to make a disco ball

Lookin' good!

Gluing in the bottom floor

Mini icebox with open doors

The disco ball will hang in the disco, not the dining room.

Dining room with kitchen behind

North Bay Young Makers Meeting - Plussing

We went to the third North Bay Young Makers meeting in San Francisco this weekend. Andrew, Chelsea, and Alf learned the basics of coppersmithing from Alexis Turner, an amazing artist. Here is her website: http://www.lexiebecjewelry.com/leather.html.  Working with the handsaw was pretty challenging. Art and Andrew also went to the session on 3D fabrication with Andrew Taylor of Autodesk.

Afterwards there was a "plussing" session where we told about our project. Chelsea and Alfia stayed at the table and told about our project. Art and Andrew walked around and looked at other projects.

After lunch we listened to speakers. There was Dale Dougherty who founded Maker Faire. Alexis Turner the jeweler, and Tom Lipton who makes stuff for Lawrence Berkeley Lab also spoke. It was interesting and inspiring. 

Young Makers North Bay webpage

Arduino Initiations

We're not sure how we're going to wire this thing up, especially since Art is the only one of us who has real experience with wiring or electronics.  Today we unpacked the Arduino kit and started working through the Arduino book. I started going through the Processing book a few weeks ago and am really enjoying that. I'm not sure how we're going to use them together, if we are, but working on the Processing makes the Arduino code pretty easy to understand.

Chelsea wants the disco ball to light up and spin, which we should probably be able to do. Not sure if we're going to put it in the speaker or aim the light at it. Also, I'm worrying about how we'll wire the iMac although there are plenty of openings in it. That's for Art to mentor us on.

The Arduino kit is fun to play with but I'm pretty ham-handed when it comes to getting the wires and resistors into the breadboard. Chelsea is much better at it than I am.  Even after reading most of the book, the Arduino board is still pretty mysterious to me. It'll probably just take a lot more practicing with it.

Also, we burned out a couple of LEDs because we didn't take the resistor requirements seriously enough. Doh. Art made us a Scratch program to help us figure out the resistors. 

 I need to wear these magnifying glasses to even see the holes in the breadboard!

The holes in that breadboard are really small!

So yeah, the electronics part is going to take a bunch of work and more Art helping out.

Flooring options

We're thinking about using LEGO as flooring. We played around with Duplo, which would be fine for adding furniture, but not so good if we want to use regular-sized LEGO people.

Measuring the inside of the frame. Since it's an irregular, rounded shape we're looking for something moldable for the bottom of the floor, like styrofoam or thick cardboard. The floors have to be flat, obviously.

Thinking about flooring, Chelsea and Alf play with LEGO. Duplo is easy to use for fast prototyping. We may even use some of the cute Duplo animals for the dollhouse "people".

Red Duplo looks nice inside the blue iMac with the strawberry keyboard

Side view

Playing around with ideas for design elements

We want to use the logic board and circuit board in general as design elements.  They're pretty dirty and need to be cleaned.

Prying it apart, releasing components

Playing with dislocated keys and bottle caps

 

We have a lot of corks and a lot of bottle caps. Thinking what to do with them.

Putting it back together from scratch

Now it's time to start putting it back together as something else.

Snapping the pieces back in place was a lot easier than pulling them apart

The top is snapped in

The speakers make sweet goggles - or maybe chandeliers

Now to figure out the framework for flooring and wiring..

Gutting the iMac!!!

This weekend we finally gutted the iMac G3! We had to be especially careful about staying grounded and not getting any charge from the CRT. We continued to use the official Apple iMac G3 takeapart guide found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/103447/iMac-G3-Disassembly-Guide

  Almost endless unscrewing. We kept all the screws in little tupperwares and separated the different types in case we needed them later. The little round things are speakers and they were the hardest things to get out. There are lots of tabs around the frame that need to be popped out to get to the screws underneath. The YouTube videos really don't help much with that. The official guide form Apple really is the best way to go.

 

The logic board was underneath.  Just took a lot of unscrewing to get it out but not too big a deal.

 Peekaboo. Getting this front piece off was a huge pain and took a lot of careful prying. We did crack it a little bit, but nothing too bad. We glued and taped it afterwards.

 

The CRT is revealed. Had to be extra careful here and follow directions on pages 76 - 79 of the guide.  Beware of the Degaussian cable!

 

More unscrewing..

 

Finally the CRT is out. We will bring it to the electronic recycler.

The back and frame pieces. We'll wait for the glue to dry on the frame and start putting it back together next.  

Let the dismantling begin

Today we started taking apart the iMac. It is a LOT of unscrewing!  We are keeping the screws in separate containers as we go.  Some are really hard to get out.

Getting started

Speakers exposed

Working to remove the hard drive casing

Hard to get to screws!

At Young Makers North Bay Session 2

Today we all went to session 2 of the North Bay Young Makers group.  We started out by going around to different tables that had examples of various useful Maker stuff, such as circuit building kits, mechanical cardboard sculpture, and a table for making cool fabric and duct tape wallets and purses.  Art taught us about electrical circuits and we built some simple circuits.

Afterwards we had a "plussing" session during which we told about our project ideas and saw other people's. We showed the cardboard prototype pics, the iMac pics, and the start of our Scratch layout prototype. We talked about how we would like to add electronics for interactivity. Tony gave us some good ideas for using infrared photosensors for sensing in the dollhouse.

The last part of the session had a great, inspiring talk by Carley Jacobson of Instructables about how she got into making stuff. She shared some of her many "instructable" projects on the site including an awesome Xena costume, a bookshelf bed, plumbing pipe shelves, and beef jerky underwear! Then Mark Harrison of DIY Drones showed us some of his homemade drones and video of them flying. We got to find out how they're made and what it costs to make them (from super-cheap to pretty expensive).

Making circuits. Below, Art shows how electrical circuits work.

Yoda and Hippo approve of Chelsea's LED circuit.

Andrew works on cyberdollhouse bed design in GIMP.

Prototyping the layout in Scratch.