Martin Hill

I’m over the moon! Can’t believe that I have been chosen to take part in this amazing programme run by Inspiring Stories. 

Things are moving so fast now. The challenge will be keeping on top of all the amazing opportunities that have presented themselves. Aside from this, I have A project for MOTAT, an exhibition for Summer in The Square as well as my grandparents arriving for my graduation all happening in December. That's not even to mention what I have to complete for University

Today I added three strips all the way around and it made a huge difference. With six strips, we will have more than enough light even in an environment that isn’t completely dark. 

It has been interesting to see how people interact with it so far. Everyone so far likes the instantaneously noticeable response and the amount of control they have of the colour with just their proximity.

Today we tested the power consumption of our LED’s and if we would be able to run them all from one Arduino. I was fairly confident about running them I was just not sure how much current they would need.

Pictured above we have over 130 LED’s connected to the Arduino, that is a little over  the amount that we need for each triangle. When shining a solid colour through the LED’s they draw about 700 milliamps. When we tried shining white there we couldn't draw enough current to get them up to full brightness. We are going to need between 1 and 2 amps to be able to achieve that.

This got me thinking about how much current we could pass through our Teensy microcontroler that we are planning to use. I discovered that if we were to connect the power for the LED’s we would blow the 500 milliamp fuse that it has for safety. 

Using the measurements that we had taken of the bridge, I built this prototype using cardboard and tape.

We are using some Neopixels LED strips connected to an Arduino to see how the light diffuses through the frosted acrylic sheet. It's a bit hard to tell what it will look like in the end as we only have one strip of LED’s rather than 3 all the way around. We will need to do some more testing tomorrow to see what effect this has.

We also tested the ultrasonic distance sensor and discovered that even with two pointing directly at each other they don't interfere. In this test, we are just mapping the proximity to the sensor to the hue of the LED’s. In this case, all the LED’s are the same colour but because we are using Neopixels we have the ability to control each LED individually. This is will allow us to programme simple behaviors to begin with and expand the functionality later down the track with an easy code update.

We uncovered an interesting flaw in our code through our testing. After a certain period of time, the distance sensor would seem to get ‘stuck’ and stop giving us values. 

After some further investigation and debugging we discovered that the integer variable that we had been using to check against the internal time of the Arduino became a negative value after 32,767 milliseconds. This is due to the fact that the variable container stores a limited number of digits and overflows (goes back to the start; -32,768) when it reaches greater than the largest number. You can think of the number line going around in one continuous loop over and over.

For this project, we have been meeting each month for about 2-3 hours. This has been quite a drag, especially at the start. A lot of the time it just feels like we are wasting time. Most of the meeting is spent just getting everyone on the same page.

It has improved significantly since we split into teams and assigned team leads. At today's meeting, we gave an update and listening to everyone else it feels as though we are ahead of most other teams. It’s a bit annoying at this stage because we are waiting on others to progress.

Just had a phone interview with someone from Inspiring Stories for a summer programme called Live The Dream. I felt like it went really well. I absolutely loved the process applying for this. The more I write or share my vision for Life Without Limits the clearer my vision becomes and the more determined I become to make it happen. You can find my application here

At the Youth Engagement Session with Philanthropy New Zealand I saw some people that I had met thorough my talk at the Young Innovators Collective. Events like these are great to connect with people who are going places in the world. I want to surround myself with more people like this.

After this event I arranged to catch up with Nicole Lin who was also attending. She is really passionate about the using power of storytelling to empower people. We ended up tagging along with Sam Jeter and heading up to his office just around the corner. At the age of only 20 he is the founder Notifr.com - a web based feedback system for educators.

This was an awesome opportunity to ask questions and share my passions with both of these incredible people. We ended up hanging out until the early hours of the morning. There was just so much we could talk about. It was incredible to hear each of their stories. The insights I received from them are amazing.

The biggest thing I learnt was that no matter what happens if you get stuck in with your passions somehow it will work out. So be yourself and start doing something.

Dr. Oscar Tomico is Assistant Professor of the Designing Quality in Interaction Research Group and part of Wearable Senses at Eindhoven University of Technology. Today we had the privilege of hearing about the amazing work that he has been doing. 

Why don't we talk about technology in the same way we talk about fashion? How do we make the experience more personal?

Create a platform that allows the user to explore and adapt it to them.

It is important to understand the relation between the body and technology.

Use the body in the design process.

Test not only on yourself but on others too.

Don't try and do something that you are not good at. Get a team of experts.  From the design of the actual project all the way to how you present it in the end.  Have a clear area that each person is assigned to. Talk through the object itself rather than making it personal.

By taking an intimate more personal approach you can intuitively feel if it's right

original plan

new venue

staging option 1

From the 2D staging design, I modeled this to scale and in 3D. It was a good challenge to pick up solid works again since using it in my first year. Let’s just say I did a lot of googling to find answers.

This term my youth group (Oxygen Youth Church) are having a 360 stage for one of the nights. We generally do this once every year. I have taken this opportunity to do some design development for this event. 

Firstly I measured all the staging equipment we currently have available for youth so that I could mock-up some new designs to scale.