This class session marked our second week in the Fab Lab. Previously, my group worked with laser cutters and found great enjoyment in getting to see a digital design come to life through rastering and cutting. This week we switched gears and worked with some arduinos. The arduino boards were simple enough to work with that our entire group caught on rather quickly. Before we knew it, we had the basic functionalities mapped out and began exploring additional possibilities with the hardware lying around us.

In experimenting with circuits and capacitive sensing, a few others and I unconsciously began ideating with regard to a semester final project. Before we knew what had happened, we had constructed a crude force sensor. However, at this point it does not directly measure the amount of force applied, but can give us implied data points regarding the distance between contacts and frequency of impacts. It was at this point when we formalized our group’s members and began actually working towards that goal.

What we experienced this week was the maker mindset really coming together I think for the first time since the start of this course. Three individuals who have had little to no previous interaction prior to Monday came together and quickly managed to come out with a crude capacitive sensor, complete with shielded assembly. This happened for no reason other than the fact that we were all genuinely interested in applying what we had just learned, and in seeing random bits and pieces of brainstorming coming together in a final output. It was truly exciting to see how we could consider alternatives to what we were doing, and immediately experiment and witness results.

This kind of iterating was only made possible because of the Fab Lab, a place I hope to go back to even after my time in this course.