What’s in a face?

Design, ideas, progress, challenges, and workarounds for my semester project. Part 4 of 5

With the functionality implemented on a working prototype, the last few stages are aesthetic.

I designed the casing and enclosing structure to be in the style of a press-fit laser cut box. These are something that I really liked the look of and wanted to have a go at creating.

examples of press-fit boxes

I designed it in the editing program Inkscape, and have made it out of 1/8” wood.

Hand drawing a box design. Hoping it will fit together!

laser cutting the design

putting the box together

I built in a platform to raise the level of the LEDs so that they would cast a general glow, instead of seeing point lights. (point lights are visible if it is mounted directly onto the base).

While the box does interlock, I didn’t design it to take into account the material that would be removed when the laser cuts, so it does not “press fit” together on its own. A glue gun fixes everything though.

On designing the clock face

Tying in with my equations, and “world fundamentals” theme, I wanted an equally relevant clock face.

A lot of ideas that I came across involved using numbers that numerically evaluated to the clock face number:

clockface examples

These were fun, but I wanted each number to have a deeper meaning. The result is a clock face where each number is relevant to a different mathmatical theorem. The majority of this clock face was found online.