Interactive Touch Board of Noah With Lights/Sounds

This is the Assistive Touch project that my group worked on for our class, Physical Computing, at Boston College. This project aims to provide technology that can aid the students at the Campus School in Boston College which consists of students from 8 to 22 years old who have physical or mental disabilities. We chose to create a touch board with the Circuit Playground Bluefruit for a student, Noah, who wanted to learn/interact with the letters of his name. Thus, we created a box that uses capacitive touch for each letter of the name Noah to light up the box and say the letter using a speaker connected to the CPB. Additionally, we 3D printed a shark, as it is one of his favorite animals, and upon touching a capacitive touch sensor near the shark, it lights up the whole board and says Noah's name.

Supplies

Materials:

1. Baltic Birch 1/8th inch
2. Green Acrylic 1/8th inch
3. Circuit Playground Bluefruit
4. Screws
5. Alligator Clips
6. Power Supply
7. LED Strip
8. Speaker
9. Sandpaper
10. Black Paint and brushes
11. Glue
12. Hot Glue Gun

Resources:

1. Laser Cutter
2. 3D Printer
3. Supplies and software
4. Adobe Illustrator
5. Festi boxes
6. Mu
7. Thingiverse.com

Step 1: Create the Letters

This step is to create the letters of Noah for the acrylic and the cut-out for the box

Internet:

• You may search for any font or size for the letters. We used Bubble letters, attached above, as it is easier to read and aesthetically pleasing.
• Download the letters, preferably with a transparent background

Adobe Illustrator:

1. Open Adobe Illustrator
2. Using the Pen art tool, trace the letters to create an outline of the letters so they may be laser cut
3. After the outlines are created, put the outline color for the letters as red (FF0000) and put the fill of the letters as black (000000). This will allow it to be laser cut and also engrave the letters. Put the stroke as 0.01 mm.
4. Note: If your letters are nonsymmetric on the y-axis, flip them on their y-axis so that the engraved side will be on the side that can be hidden. Check out the file to see how we did it with the letter "N".
5. Download the file as .ai
6. Place the 1/8th inch Green Acrylic in the laser cutter, and laser cut

Step 2: 3D Printing the Shark

1. Go to thingiverse
2. Search for appropriate shark designs
3. Download the shark designs
4. Put the Shark design on the 3D printer editor, we used the Prussa application
5. Choose the appropriate size, we chose to keep the whole shark under 3 inches
6. Print the shark with the material of your choice. We used a yellow PLA filament

Step 3: Creating the Box

To create the box:

Festi Boxes:

1. Open Festi Boxes
2. Click on the Console box option
3. Create a box using the dimensions you want for your boxes. You may refer to our Adobe Illustrator file to check the precise dimensions
4. Choose a thickness of 3.175 mm
5. Generate an SVG file and download

Adobe Illustrator:

1. Open Adobe Illustrator
2. Remove any labels and unnecessary details
3. Make sure to remove the backboard of the box, as we will be putting in a sliding board instead.
4. Create 5 circles of the size of your screws so that the tail of the screw can easily fit in, but it is smaller than the head of the screw: (size of tail < size of diameter < size of head). This will be placed on the slanted side of the board
5. From the letters that we created previously, place them on the flat-top side of the box. Make sure that the letters that you place on the board have a white fill (FFFFFF), and make sure any of the letters you might have flipped on its y-axis are now in their normal state for the holes. Additionally, scale the letters to be 0.75x the size of the laser-cut letters, so that you are able to glue them to the box later on.
6. Create 2 rectangles on the sides of the board with a width that is greater than 1/8th inch and a length that is smaller than the total height of the box. Consult the file attached to see what this looks like. This is where you can slide the backboard into the box.
7. Finally, put the outline color as red (FF0000), and put the stroke as 0.01 mm
8. Download the file as .ai
9. Place the Baltic Birch 1/8th inch into the laser cutter and cut the box

Assembly

1. Use Wood glue to put all sides of the box together
2. Wait at least half a day for the glue to solidify
3. After the box has been assembled, use sandpaper to sand the edges throughout the box in order to have a rounded cut for the box. We did this so that there were no sharp edges that could hurt or harm Noah in the process of using the box.
4. Using Black Paint, paint the entire box black. This was done so that the color black offers a good contrast with colors and aids people with CVI.
5. After painting the box, place the Arcylic letters on top of the holes and hot glue them onto the box so that they are durable

To create the backboard:

Adobe Illustrator

1. Create a rectangle, with the height of it being a bit smaller than the height of the hole that you cut in the box. Make the length of the rectangle bigger than your whole board so that the board can slide in and out easily
2. Put the outline color as red (FF0000), and put the stroke as 0.01 mm
3. Download the file as .ai
4. Place the Baltic Birch 1/8th inch into the laser cutter and cut the box

Assembly

1. Paint the whole backboard in Black Paint.
2. Test out the board so that the board can be slotted in and taken out easily

Step 4: The Electronics

Mu:

1. Create a program that uses capacitive touch, in conjunction with LED lights and audio, to create an interactive touch board
2. Find .wav files for the audio online that you need to use. We have provided our audio files with the necessary adjustments so that it works with the CPB
3. Use the code as a basis/guidance for the program

Assembly:

1. Place the screws into the holes and hot glue them into the holes.
2. Connect the alligator clips from your capacitive touch in the CPB to the Screws.
3. Place the LED strip, Speaker, Power supply, and CPB inside the box
4. Close the box from the back using the backboard we created previously
5. Test out the board and have fun!