A couple weeks ago my friend and I went to a hack-a-thon at the University of Illinois. We are part of a local makerspace in Peoria,IL (River City Labs) about an hour and a half away, and I convinced him to join me for the 30 hour long hack-a-thon. The theme was “wearable technology”. We had many ideas throughout the day/night, but the one thing we agreed on was that we wanted to use the laser cutter in some way. We want through 4 different ideas throughout the night and spent about 5 hours on one idea that didn’t pan out. We eventually settled on something that is absolutely ridiculous, but really fun.
My friend designed the glasses in Fusion 360, and we cut them out on an epilog with 1/8" tinted acrylic. I wrote a really simple arduino sketch, and threw everything on a breadboard. We used polymorph to attach the servos to the makeshift head band and hot glued the gasses onto the servo horns. I think we were really surprised that it even worked, considering how it was thrown together at the last minute. We didn't realize until we presented it, that every other team took the hack-a-thon alot more serious than we did. The other teams made really cool concepts involving keeping track of your pets, to helping the elderly, to an awesome concept for a new cast. There were some really bright kids there as well! One group of kids made a musical instrument sleeve, and another team of kids made a multipurpose jacket. Our project on the other hand was absolutely ridiculous, and everyone got a good laugh out of it, so I think we succeeded. You can watch some of the hilarity that insued when we got it to finally work. https://youtu.be/gCgpxNRwInE I have considered making a version 2 that has an adjustable 3d printed frame along with Bluetooth and an app to control it. I will also fine tune the settings so that it doesn't move as fast. It can be painful at times.TL;DR Went to a local wearables themed hack-a-thon. Everyone took it very seriously. We made something absolutely ridiculous, but funny.
