Designing a business card printer for the degree show

I am finally happy that I have most of the details necessary for the design of this printer.

With help from Angus Main the system is now fully operational since Monday. All that is needed to make the printer print a business card at the press of a button is to plug it into a power supply!

The printer is currently reserved for external assessment and the result of this is that I can only start working on building it physically next week. I make what I can in the interim.

Front view of the printer

Top view with section cut

Back view

Success!!!!

I managed to print my cat jokes properly using the thermal printer!!!!

Turns out I had the Arduino plugged in all wrong. I changed the wiring according to these instructions, then continued to use the code from aidafruit. In order to print the jokes properly (previously words got broken into new lines) I am now using bitmap images at 384px wide, thus controling the font, characters, line spacing etc. I can even print images!

I am using images instead of text to control the text appearance

The correct way to wire up the Arduino (from adafruit)

In this old printout you can see spaces appear at beginning of new lines, and words broken into the next line  

Designing the Joke dispenser + more badges

I have a list of things to get done by tomorrow:

For Talk Over Tea:

• Redesign posters for Talk Over Tea
• Redesign TOT table tents
• Make more Badges
• Print more logbooks

For the Joke dispenser:

• Design the exterior
• Make 10p vouchers
• Edit videos at 1028x768

And finally for the Science (Cat Joke) book:

• Figure out splitting printed lines
• have fun with my thermal printer!

So far today, I have made progress on two of these points. I have made more badges and began designing the Joke Dispenser.

The photos of the progress are below.

I need to make more! 

Provisional front of the dispenser

cog themed design (I need to reason it out though - not quite there yet...

The vinyl cuts are designed in Illustratur 

Today I need to write down many things

Insert from my diary:

–  where am I with regards to the cat joke box project
– where am I with regards to a penny for your joke project
– where am I with regards to talk over tea project

I will start with the left latter as it is the freshest in my mind.

# Talk over tea
I just finished working on a third or fourth variation for the talk over tea logo. I want to play with negative space and at the moment, I am trying to make a teacup superimposed with the word talk and have that the handle serves as the capital O for ‘Over tea’.
It isn’t going very well… Tomorrow is the first day when talk over tea will be running.  I got a second number for texts, so that customers do not have to use twitter. At the moment I’m thinking that I should promote people to use what’s app.
I have printed three logbooks for tomorrow they have places to enter date, time, name, location, order and further comments.
I am fairly apprehensive, as I am aware there is a lot that can go wrong. I have made plans to do other things during the day tomorrow in case talk over tea does not prove popular. Right now the’ worst’ thing that could happen is if #TOT proved extremely popular. I would not know how to deal with too much demand. But I will cross that bridge when I get to it. I really hope that it will prove easy to enlist help from other third years (or final year MA students).
it just occurred to me that I now have time to make quick designs for a talk over tea tray. The tray will be 50 cm over 35 cm it will have the words talk over tea carved into it somewhere and will have four dips for takeaway cups.

Log book mistake printed on see through paper

My three plain and proper log books

Inside layout - plain and to the point

I am struggling with the whole logo concept - I may just stick with a logotype or my older variation of the logo

Tray design

# Penny for your joke
I have a bag with four castor wheels, I bought from screw fix yesterday.  Tomorrow I will spend the day waiting for customers to request drinks from the cafe. In the meanwhile, I told one of the technicians downstairs that I will spend the day with him building the exterior of my joke machine. Made out of MDF, it will be a 1.7 m tall device, I haven’t got it written down but I am pretty sure it will be 60 cm wide and 60 cm deep. I have recommissioned my old Toshiba and they hope to install processing on it so it can run the joke program. If all goes well, I will have the parts ready and I will be able to assemble everything over Easter Break.



# Cat joke machine
 I have in my hand, envelope which contains a USB A to B cable, there are five thermal paper rolls and an AC power adapter inside it. I bought all of these with the intention of using them to power the thermal printer which I have a university. They should allow me to  to interact with my printer with much more ease than I currently have. I still haven’t used the RFID module which worries me a bit. I don’t know how simple it will be to use it, and I doubt that I will be able to connect it to the printer by myself.

A day of stress and anxiety

My mid point review is on Tuesday at 11:00 - I have nothing prepared to show at the moment and I am #stressed beyond what I can explain.

But here is a description of what I would like to have by then:
- an A5 booklet* with notes and #WIP images of my three projects: ‘Science Book’, ‘Penny for your Jokes’ and ‘Talk over tea’
- the mechanism which will be inside the Joke dispenser for ‘#PFYJ’
- the mechanism that will be inside the Schrodinger cat book (Science book)
- any visual material like badges for the tea service.

The problem is that I must act fast and I am not certain I am up to the task

Here is a work in progress photo of a cat joke printed on thermal paper:

And here are some notes Yoriko took for me during a chat we had about the 'Talk over tea" idea

More on Science book brief

Since my last post on the Unit 10 'Science book' brief I have change direction quite a bit.

I am now planning to create a device that will produce freshly printed text each time a magnetic card is detected near it.

The device has a cat shape recess to indicate where a card should be placed. I chose the shape because of the relationship this idea has to the Schrödinger Cat thought experiment.

Side section

Top section

Wireframe view

A project concerned with meaningful exchanges bargains respect and social capital.

The project that I am currently working on will be the first self initiated brief as a part of unit 10 of my degree. I have not made any more progress on my previous work, but I have decided to put that on hold because I am incredibly interested in this project, and I don't think I can do much for the 'science book' at the moment.

 The basic principle and the inspiration for my project is how to transform uncomfortable or unwanted social interactions into rewarding and meaningful ones. When I was 15 I was in Los Angeles and as I was walking into a McDonald's a beggar asked my cousin for money. I cannot remember whether she acknowledged him or ignored him but she did not give him anything. It struck me as curious I asked her why did she do that. She told me something along the lines of 'he's only going to use it for drugs '. At that time I was living in a kibbutz in Israel and this was one of my first encounters with a person in  such a situation. Nevertheless, since that experience my attitude towards such requests from beggars was pretty much in line with my cousin's.
While studying for my dissertation I came across the notion of social capital.  I made a connection between two observations in this field. The first is that the more individual members contribute and support their community the better the community becomes. Or in other words, that just because you help to somebody else in your community the chance of somebody entirely different would help anyone else who needs it is increased.  The second observation is that when people interact socially, they  form some kind of agreement, a social bargain. So friendships for example is a kind of 'be there for me and I'll be there for you' type of agreement.
I had a realisation that relationships and interactions which I deem meaningful all make me feel I am getting something out of them. I then started thinking of relationships I did not rate meaningful which is where the beggar incident popped into my mind. It was almost funny to find myself in a situation where I am thinking 'what can I get out of a beggar? '.
What can you get out of somebody who has no material possession? Who is so desperate that he is asking me for money… Up until that point my reason for not giving money to beggars was that they might use it for drugs, or that I do not know what no use it for. So I started asking beggars for that information, but  in order to make it meaningful even if they are lying I would video their response.

Traded £1 with a homeless so he'd tell me what he'll do with it #BeggingBargain @camdenTalking https://t.co/doJXyUXxXD
— Gilad Visotsky (@v_gilad) August 19, 2013

Suddenly, I was 100% okay with giving the money. It's almost like it didn't matter what they would do with it because they did something for it and therefore the money is theirs.

 To tap into this kind of conditioning in my brain and to manipulate it felt pretty amazing.  I introduced a tiny change to an existing occurrence, and since my outlook of people has transformed. Because I now look at beggars as individuals with  something which is potentially personally valuable to me.

 for my project I want to use this premise and create something, I don't know what, that is engaging and nonjudgemental. I don't really have an opinion as to what needs to be done about the homeless people, beggars and the likes. But there are real steps that if taken (judging by my own experience) can change the way that we look at other (marginal?) members of society.

Designing my quantum book.

I am in the progress of designing a kind of book which produces pages for the reader to observe without disclosing information as to the coming page's content. To achieve this the book will allow the extraction of desirably one page at a time.

Side view

Bottom view

Side view of the internal mechanism

I am planning to use wood and foam to create the book. paper can then be inserted into the box. I am confident that there are issues I am not taking into account. These may have to do with how paper reacts to foam or how narrow the bottom opening is, as it may be too narrow for pages to be extracted or so wide that pages simply fall through. I hope that by producing a prototype I can better identify and address them. My chllange now is o find the time and figure out how to produce it.

My not-so-amazing mock-ups for tomorrow

For my first Unit 10 project, I need to come up with a design for a book based on Quantum Theory. Inspired by the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. I want to make a book that produces pages at random based on input from the user. In such a way, one cannot know which page he or she will read next.

My paper mockups

The 'Smint' book, produces a page at random when a button is pressed

The sphere book, contains multiple rolled up pages to be pulled out at random

I am not entirely happy with my mock-ups but I hope that after tomorrow I will have a better idea how to proceed! Fingers crossed!