Pretty much every day for the past fourteen weeks, I’ve felt a strange cocktail of emotions. Extreme luck, for one, to have the time and the space to be here. An onrush of anxiety, nostalgia for an experience currently underway, the sense that it will all be over before I can get my bearings. The headiness and intimacy of late nights and early mornings spent making things, breaking things, offering up help and learning how to ask for it.

Learning is uncomfortable, too. It’s been a long time since I sucked at something new, and this class in particular has brought that sensation in spades. Between wiring, code, and the everyday random luck of the draw, there are so many ways even the simplest-seeming physical computing project can go wrong.

Working on my final project revealed…many of them! I’m proud of this little gizmo, but there are so many ways that I wish it were better or just different, that I’d chosen to put energy in certain directions rather than others, that I had more patience or precision or coherence. I don’t know that I’d be able to articulate those preferences, though, if I hadn’t gone through the process of making this.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/huCmEcRL5OQ

First sketch of this project idea - 10/18

Second sketch, somehow both way more and way less ambitious - 10/18

Revised sketch, 10/30ish — largely what it looks like now

From the start of this class I was interested in miniatures. I’m not sure if it was the scale we began learning at, or a more general disposition toward smallness and the creativity that comes with abstraction and limitation, but all of my first electronic experiments were about how to make tiny versions of real-life objects — a failed attempt at a Barbie-sized blender using a servo motor (I would definitely just use a DC now), a number of tiny lamps that became the prototypes for the streetlights in this piece.

At first, I thought I wanted to make an interior, which I originally pitched as my midterm project. I could still see taking that on at some point, but I learned so much tackling the final that the original “plan” is just very clearly not one. I’m also so glad I got to work with Yafira on our little handheld; that was probably the highlight of my semester in this class.

The streetlights were the first part of this idea to come together; I made three or four different prototypes, and ultimately found that mimicking a real lamp (with a hollow shaft + base to hold wires) worked the best. This is the unpainted final version, made of a stack of wooden buttons, a thin cardboard straw, and a glass bead.

To that end, I do wonder if I should have tried to partner up on this project too. I think if I’d had to toss ideas back and forth with someone else, whatever we came up with would almost certainly have been more legible of a concept, and I could have focused on the aspects I was the most excited about and comfortable with (fabrication!) while having support in the ones I felt less sure of (coding!)

Because I was solo, I found myself unaccountably favoring my good leg, as it were, and that’s something I’d like to be more conscious of over the next three semesters. I know I can make something cute, and I know I can write an essay describing its meaning. I still don’t know that I can make something terribly technically challenging, or something where I have to get the hell out of the way so the user can experience it entirely for themselves. I got closer with this project, but I absolutely overindexed on decoration and vibes and details, and underindexed on working out those newer- and scarier-to-me skill sets.

Here’s what I learned and what I’m pleased with here:

• I felt much more comfortable working with the basics of electronics than I did during the midterm — soldering, developing my own wiring schemes, and understanding how to supply power were all real iffy for me even just six weeks ago, and now I genuinely find at least the former to be outright pleasurable.
• I’m also a lot more comfortable with programming, which I’d like to credit Mimi with as well. It was a goal of mine to not rely on ChatGPT or similar for this project, and while what I ended up with is extremely simple, it’s mine, and I understand every line of it. I do have a ChatGPT-ified version of some code I tried to work out for a more complex version, but ultimately I don’t really like it as a tool beyond benign personal tutor, and have found that talking to humans (and reading Arduino examples, mostly written by you in 2011) is far, far more immediately helpful.
• Troubleshooting - taking it one step at a time to work backward through all branches of a problem (wiring? components? code? Arduino IDE just deciding to stop working for like two minutes and then acting like everything is fine????????). Your demonstrations in class of how to approach a snarl have been super helpful, as has the realization that all of this is really just organization. If things are in the right place, they do tend to work, so it’s a matter of ensuring they are all actually there.
• Descoping. Basically this whole semester has been an exercise in the humiliation of hubris; virtually everything I’ve made has been like, one fifth of what I’ve envisioned. What was important to me here, even at the smallest scale, was to make a case for why this should be mechanical and electronic in the first place. I wanted the light to interact with the motion, and while there are many, many more ways I think I could make the system more sophisticated or just interesting, I am excited about what I’ve started to play with there — the mirrors on the gear shaft feel like the beginning of something.

Some of the best ideas came from other people telling me what they wanted from or saw in the piece. Niki suggested a disco ball within ten seconds of laying eyes on it, which led me down a whole rabbit hole of light and mirrors — the closest I came to putting the mechanics in conversation with the electronics.

Here’s what I’d like to continue to work on:

• More precision and attention to detail — virtually all of my mistakes were due to sloppiness, (blew up an Arduino by forgetting to run to VIN while using an external power source; confusing my wires because they were messy and assuming that meant many other things were broken), often brought on by stress / the desire to just get something done. Doing things the right way, however painstakingly, usually wound up saving me time in the long run because I wouldn’t need to redo it. I cut corners like this in other parts of my life — when I don’t gauge swatch before knitting, when I don’t measure ingredients precisely while baking — and regret it more often than not.
• Descoping……..even more! Which feels like the eternal lesson of ITP / making things in general. This dovetails with joining up with a partner or group, which could have made more of a lift more possible.
• Working with buttons in such a way that they do not make me want to cry — I thought I had healthy respect for their complexity, but I was truly humbled here. If there’s one thing I can improve about this piece before the Winter Show, it’s swapping out the basic on/off code for working fades and animations. The wiring and components are all there, and at least now I have a draft to work from.