This has been, bar none, the project I’ve learned the most from so far at ITP. I learned concrete lessons like how to start using rotary encoders and C++ and a soldering iron, and also how to even begin to approach a project like this in the first place, which feels more ineffable but just as valuable.
Working with Yafira was truly the highlight. I love how we conceptualized our partnership — as largely asynchronous creative collaborators, with a lot of trust and latitude for the other. Once we’d settled on the contours of the piece, we each had separate, modular zones of exploration; this meant we could work independently but with the support and structure of a partner, and that we could get further together than either of us could have gotten on our own in the time allotted.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/88uPaBGhPfY
The “finished” product
We had….some amount of hubris going into this, at least when it came to scope. Because there would be two of us, we reasoned, we could do a LOT in terms of interaction and input, and so our original idea was kind of a sprawl.
Inspired by a box of chocolates and old-school Nintendo hardware, we came up with an idea for a sort of adult busy board called BlissBox.io; the idea was that it was, essentially, a good day in a box, a zany, delightful object you could pick up and fiddle with for a moment to calm or center yourself.
Our moodboard
Our original design…….were we ever so young?
That central kernel did last, including the name, but the vast majority of components did not. After mapping out wiring, going over materials, and coming up against the constraints of time, ingenuity, and physics, we wound up descoping the project so that it would be much smaller, consisting of only two major interactive components: a display controlled by two push buttons, and a speaker controlled by a rotary encoder.
It would be, essentially, a kind of tactile GameBoy, except instead of a game as such you would be served little reminders, bits of nostalgic MIDI songs, and glimpses of ASCII art — a tiny vibe machine, if you will, and perhaps a tad more legible of a concept than the original.
Our bill of materials (minus many wires and resistors)
Yafira handled the sound, and I figured out the display. We mostly worked separately at this stage, texting each other about our triumphs and pitfalls and ideas.
For my part, I spent a lot longer on code than I expected to; the wiring was fairly straightforward once I got the hang of the OLED and had the buttons mapped out. The real challenge was making text appear the way I wanted it to and refining the button presses.
I’ve written simple dialogue engines for video games before, which was helpful for understanding the theory here (storing characters in arrays, iterating over each individually to control timing and animation) but it still probably took around 8 hours of IDE-gazing, plus an assist from ChatGPT, to get the thing even remotely working the way I wanted it to. It was an object lesson in how the simplest-seeming functions can take the longest to enact well, and made me extra glad we’d already radically slimmed the project down.
A sample exchange
As we got closer to finishing out the functionality, we each took on a secondary task — I fabricated the enclosure, and Yafira built a website + guestbook for the project, accessible if you scan an NFC tag embedded in the body with your phone. (We both took a workshop this fall on tactile computing and became kind of obsessed with sneaking NFCs into things.)
I prototyped a couple of cardboard faces on the laser to ensure that all the elements would fit properly, and ultimately made the final body out of basswood. We’d flirted with the idea of acrylic, but given that the Arduino is going to have to come out of this thing sooner rather than later and that adhering acrylic is way messier and more trouble than it was worth, we like where we landed.
For the final version, we decided to swap the power supply for a 9V battery, which led to the idea of the on/off switch (a very clutch junk shelf discovery) and the mounted LEDs.
Prototype #1.5
Prototype #1.75
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EY3-g1zu158
I cannot overstate how fragile / janky the physical plant is; I did things with a glue gun that I am in no way proud of. I saw Ji-You’s wiring yesterday and blanched with envy, because in comparison this is like a rat’s nest of wires shoved into a box.