This week was a fun last week in the fab lab. We were able to see our projects finally come together into a finished product. Everyone gathered their materials from the past two weeks including the embroidery patch and the box we made with the laser cutter. Once we had everything together the experts in the fab lab taught us about conductivity and how we could stitch LED lights into our embroidery patches.

The most important thing we learned is that positive wires could not cross a negative wire. I think this was an issue for several students in the class, including myself. Another issue people were facing is not having a strong enough connection from the battery to the wire. I think the reason for this is because we would only loop the wire once through the holes on the battery and light as opposed to doin got several times as they suggested. However, almost all of us overcame these obstacles and were able to create really great finished products, some much more complicated than others. I was personally very excited when I was finished sewing my lights into my fabric and switching the power button on to reveal bright green lights. It took a lot of patience, but was worth it in the end. I only wish I was able to make it to class the first week to make a personalized embroidery patch. Instead, I had a blank patch that I sketched a smiley face on with a permanent marker. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this project which allowed us to learn more about the resources available to us at the fab lab that can help us with our projects that we are working on both in class as well as any personal projects people are working on, on their own.

In terms of our project, we changed our direction a little bit. Our original idea was to create a bracelet that would assist visually impaired people to find someone they were looking for in a crowd of people . As we did more research we realized we were not going to be able to make a lot of progress in the time we have left in the semester. We decided to take a different route and create a product that helps people make pour over coffee. Essentially, someone would be able to pour however much water was necessary, and our product would slowly drip the water through and create high quality coffee. When we return to campus from spring break, we hope to have a prototype developed to kick start our project.