Enhanced Design Tools

Week 1

in week 1 we got the basic idea about what design is, the tools and prototyping of the ideas and the emerging trends which are popular these days. The various technologies and tools used to make a idea or protoype come to life. There is cycle or chain of events that take place to finally get the output i.e. first of all idea generation, observation, testing that idea and then prototying. We saw various examples of lase cutting and 3d printing and various other products and services where design is used. Editing and mofification needs softwares so the once we needed for 3d printing were illustrator or inkscape. Later at the end it was all about the presentation and marking criteria. A compulsory health, safety and well being test was completed online on the same day.

Week 2

Week 2 was all about laser cutting how the machine works what are the different parts of the machine, what all things we can cut and much more. The laser is originated from in the form of beam from the laser resonator and then it is refelected from a series of mirror to the cutting head and then it is focused to a very narrow beam through the lens to a concentrated beam which then cuts things.

Products that can be easily cut down-

Cardboard is cheap and very easy to work with, it can be easily folded or moulded into different shapes or sizes which can be very useful at the times of prototyping or pacakge designing.

Acrylic- affordable and looks abit classy than cardboards, its glossy surface gives it a more appealing look. They are brittle so if not handled properly they can crack or chip especially at corners. It can very well work with robot parts, computer case parts and fan grills.

Plywood- one of the oerfect materials which can give a amazing finishing after the final cuts, but sometimes it leads to black ends after the cuts if not careful. It is mostly used by craftman to create furnitures and design them by cutting plywoods into different small pieces and then glue them together to form an unique design.

Later on we constructed a phone holder usine illustrator and then did the laser cutting of it.

laser cutting is basically used in the game designing industry for the board game developement. Various gaming industries use this method for sports board games but with the upcoming technology and advancement the popularity of the board games is going down and now it has almost become obsolete, people prefer online games instead of old school board games. Earlier this was used to construt the complete layout of the board game along with its packaging and promotion at various gaming parlours. Some famous examples of boardgames are ludo, snakes and ladder, monopoly etc. Even the games like chess have AI installed in them which makes it way easier than its earlier gameplay, it not only becomes time efficient but also reduces the mental processing of the other player.

Week 3

Here we learned about 3d printing where we have additive and subtrative manufacturing. Block of finished material is machined down to get the product where as the additive manufacturing is way more faster, energy efficient and generates less waste.

Process of 3d printing- alser is passed on to the scanner system and drops down as beam of laser to form the basic liquified base of resin, this process is known as stereolithography. The working of laser is same as in laser cutting through light source and lenses it is contracted and narrowed in the form of beam, which is also termed as digital light processing. The final process takes place when the filament from the material spool comes down through the heated extrusion head and starts forming a shape of the model which is also known as fused deposition modelling. The two tools or machines most famous in this work are Ultimaker and Prusa i3. we learnt how to create a 3d model on fusion and then tranfer it to cura to get a 3d print of that model. Depending on the model it takes time to get printed complex the model the more time it will take to print. The two things that need to be considered while 3d printing are filament type and layer height.

3d printing has become the new trend in the gaming industry as well as the movies sector, with the help of 3d printer the action figures are made which then are used for short films and movies like LEGO. This helps in the rendering process and makes it way easier than before, it eases the pain points of the animator. Even now there are softwares which help in the 3d modelling of the character and the environment but in my perspective the use of 3d printing has made the process way much easier. This can help in the stop motion pictures as well as the small teaser of the game launch. Nowadays gaming companies use gizos or action figures for the promotion of their upcoming games which is in my point of view very useful. The very famous series known as game of thrones got its whole environment build with the help of 3d printing which eventually saved a lot a time and also money.

3d models

Week 4

This week was all about microbits and processors. These microbits are way more powerful than we can imagine, they are used in computers, gaming consoles, watches and almost everything electronice we can see around us. these microbits then can be programmed to design various symbols, shapes and messages. the circuit must be complete for the electricity to flow properly just like the case of bulb the wire needs to touch both positive and negative ends to light up the buld if thats broken in between it won't work properly same in the case of micribit.

A breadboard is the series of metal strips that conduct electricity on the microbit. Connecting the positive and negative strip of the breadboard to the power and ground means they have power running through them. We learned about the various examples of magnetic based games which work on the microbit programming. Microbit sensor are used in most of the things that we see in our daily lives such as traffic lights system, then we saw this example where moisture in soil was tested with a microbit if the soil was moist enough it showed a a happy face and if not then sad face. Overview of the basic mircobit programer which was pretty easy as it already had the functions inbuild in it, the user only needs to pick them up and form an algorithm or the pattern in which the user wants the microbit to function.

These micro processors are used in the toys or the robots sold in the market for the kids. Earlier i used to work in a gaming comapny which made education or learning based games for the children of age 5-10, which basically included subjects like maths, english etc. and they also worked on board games for the children based on the idea of edutainment. They had mircobits in them which were programmed in a way so that children can interact with them while learning, which made studies even more exciting and encouraging. lets take the example of maths, students can easily mix match the real elements with the numbers to form an interesting pattern and all this worked on a proper algorithm and the backend coding done to the microbits. Then if talk about remote control cars or robots these all work with the help of mircoprocessors that are inbult within them.

Week 5

working with inventors kit and connecting it to the pc to achieve different patterns and design.

inventors kit for microbit

Week 6

I learned about how our project can be simple but innovative or it can have complex design with simple mechanism. doing this requires time and efforts and most importantly funds, cheap designs can lead to comprising with the overall quality of the product and if the product is done in overnight then it it clearly shows the priority of the work and also affects the quality of the design. So it is very necessary to keep a few questions in mind before we begin to start our project i.e. WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, defining these areas in the design would lead to technical specifications and would also upgrade the quality specification of the product or design. We saw an example of a board game named as Catan which took a lot of effort to build in but had a really simple and interesting gameplay which would attract any user towards it. Internet of things is the technological advancement that we see in our daily life and which keeps everything interconnected and makes them smarter by each passing day. for eg. lets take microprocessors earlier they used to be really big and consumed a lot of energy but with advancement they were converted into small flat chip which is now used in almost all electronic products including our computers, smartphones, refrigerators etc. Next if talk about about smartphones, 50 years ago nobody ever imagined any such thing would even exist but then it came but those mobile phones were really big and had very less features, later on developers and companies thought that with the helps of these chips they can reduce the mechanism and put it in a more smaller place and by which the connectivity would aslo increase and here we are today we can connect our smartphones with almost anything and everything like our fridge, laptops, air condition, even we can control the lights and other functions in the room by our phones.

Week 7

This week was all about Artificial Intelligence(AI). All the information that we use is entwined by AI. We have all the information at our fingertips with the help of Google and other search engines. It potentially empowers us by giving access to all sorts of knowledge available in this world, but on the other hand, we have libraries and books that serve the same purpose but we are not using them, so in a way, we are exploiting these resources. The only difference between libraries and our phone is that we can access everything right by the same time, we can link them together to create an enhanced version which no library can offer us. AI can be very useful in drawing big data and organizing it in a way that can be very useful and informative. Now let's talk about how the AI works let's see it with an example of a game so what it does is analyze the game, consider all possible moves and choose the best out of them. This sometimes can lead to problems as the AI cannot properly interpret all the information given to it and sometimes it only understands the core command given to it for eg. if the command is given to identify cats then it will only identify cats but incase a dog comes in between it won't be able to recognize it, and there comes the problem with the programming of AI. When i compare it with my field of gaming i find that most online or multiplayer games work with the help of AI, because it is really important as if the player is online or alone with the computer then AI plays a major role. As we all know in the coming future AI will take over most of the technological advancements and games as well. It is also used in most of the movies these days the best example is avengers or iron man, this movie has AI known as J.A.R.V.I.S.

Week 8

We finally decided on our project and started to work on it. The project is about how design can changes according to the mood with features like music and lights. We plan to build a device that can detect color and change the lighting of the whole room according to that and at the same time based on the mood play some relaxed or chill out music. For this we have built a house out of the plywood with the help of laser cutter, we’ll place our design inside the house to give it a more realistic look and feel. There will thin strips of lights all around the house and then there will be a key holder which will have a color sensor in it as soon as the half part of the keychain will drop in, it will sense it and light up. We used the RGB DFRobot color sensor for initial testing which eventually worked. The idea of placing a keyholder where half the part of the keychain drops in came up from the pandora’s box, its unique design really influenced us to use it as a sort of medium to show change of mood because both of them have similar abilities. For the design of the holder, we planned to have a pyramid sort of structure that will give it a more ancient and mystical appearance. We even took reference from the world-famous video where developers build a chameleon which changed its color on the basis of its background

Week 9

We first tested it on cardboard to see if all the pieces fit together and are proportionate in size, a house of about 580mm x 380mm so the best option was laser cutter. Once we saw the saw that the pieces were of perfect size, we changed the material from cardboard to plywood because we wanted edging on the house and which was not possible on the cardboard, the details would not be visible. Instead for the object or the keyholder where the half the part of the keychain will go was in the shape of a pyramid and we decided to choose 3d printing for that because as told earlier we got this idea from the pandora’s box, it needed to be solid and plus it had some carvings and patterns onto it which would give a perfect look.

Week 10

The two types of control pins; S0, S1 is for frequency scaling, S2, and S3 for the type of color to sense. Somehow with our first test we succeeded, it was with the capturing of color from a pink pen. We saw that the value of R and B went down drastically. The color pink contains a combination of the color red and blue. Voltage for the design is 5 volts, convert current to frequency. Photosensor is placed in the middle and the frequency is read by the Arduino. We used 4 led to light up the object, 3 diodes of RGB color.

Tools>board>Arduino mega 2560>processor>port>COM5

Device manager>tools>serial monitor>(output)

For the programming part, we took reference from an already created algorithm and used it in our project with some changes in it. https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Donate

Week 11

3d modeling of the pyramid.

There are many other projects based on the color sensor which work using the same RGB pattern to recognize the color. There is a project where it is used in the electronic whiteboard markers, the detector on the marker can automatically detect the color of the writing pen and hence make it convenient for the writers to store and analyze the data. TCS3200 color sensors were used for this purpose. Color sensors help in gathering the information and then transform them into electrical signals that are then analyzed by the main system. Next project is for the visually impaired people they use third person to help them to recognize a color but with the help of this device which can easily get connected to your phone and detect the color and using the phone’s speaker speak out the color for the person, it used Arduino IDE for the coding and microcontroller of the application. Next idea is from the automotive company even they use the same concept for their car mats to match their color exactly the same way our naked eye cannot identify the difference but there are differences that can only be detected and corrected by using these sensors. The lid on the color paints they are unique and are done using the same color sensing technology, they are sorted and sent to the packaging stations by this very method. The pills or the medicines that we use in our daily life their color is measure or flagged on the basis of color sensor before packaging they are sent through this process of identifying their color patterns (Gupta 2017).

All these projects that were discussed above were based or made for some industrial or business purpose but our idea is solely based on personal feelings, things that matter to us. We planned something by which each and every one of us can relate to, had a personalization impact on the people’s mind which they would love to keep with them all the time and not just for commercial purpose or when there is a need to use it, it’s something personal. At first, we wanted to create something for us so we thought of what’s common between us three, and we came up with music and that was it, the theory behind our project. At first we wanted to create something that would automatically sense the mood of the user using the camera or touch, suppose a person enters the house and there is a sensor on the doorknob which will detect your mood like if you opened the door with a bang which depicts anger, if the motion was slow and lazy it would depict tired mood. The same with the camera using the face recognition it would depict the mood and change the lights and play a song for the person. Later on we changed the idea and thought of a phone station which could eventually come with the advantage of data transfer and ability to change the lights according to situation, but these ideas already had a technological material which was then used for another technological aspect, we wanted something personal which a we carry with us in our daily life so finally we came up with the idea of keychain, the first thing a person does after coming in is put the keys at their right place so why not make something which will instantly change the environment of the house as you enter, so this was the speculative idea that we finally had.

Reflection

If I talk about what I learned personally from this course is very vast and could really help me in the future in my game designing background. First of all, let's start from the laser cutter, it is a really useful technique for the purpose of prototyping or demo project I think learning it will help me in creating the layout of the games and also this could help me in creating board games. The next useful thing related to my industry was 3d printing, although I have already done 3d modeling using Zbrush and Maya using fusion was fun and then printing it in real life was a completely new experience, this practice could be used for developing action figure or gizmos. This is also used to make small pieces or pawn in board games and on the other side if we talk about other than my field it gives any ed model a more lively appearance. The next thing I found interesting and tried to learn was micro bit along with coding, I had a really bad experience with coding in my under graduation but learning it here helped me to work with my game prototype and also in my final project idea. I also got a better understanding of the software i.e. illustrator. Overall I would say that this course helped to understand and learn how a minimal idea can be created into the most creative design and it is not necessary to have a complex mechanism into your idea even the simple logic that helps people relate with themselves can create wonders. What technology is trending in the market and what other developers are doing in the same field was another aspect that I learned.