ITP Blog

Designing the Absurd

Phone Add-on Project

After brainstorming and thinking about the many ideas we had, we decided to move forward with the phone stand one, that has LEDs that will notify the user upon receiving a notification. In terms of how the user will be notified, binary values of the ascii characters of the message is an option. The other option is morse code. But both would require the user to know how to read binary on the spot, which I would imagine is a rare thing. Morse code would probably be easier. As of now my plan is to include both in some way.

The Thought Process

Initially, I wanted to do something with the notifications. I thought it would be cool to have a phone stand that could react in some way to the notifications received. The initial idea was that the stand reads the notifications because it's a convenience to have your notifications read while you're doing other stuff. But then that would raise privacy issues. I remembered a product I had seen before, this idea of a binary clock. I thought it would be cool to implement a binary representation of the message received. Although I don't think it's very practical to learn reading binary to understand your messages, but it is indeed possible if one has enough dedication.

Technical Stuff

Working with Android Studio to read the notifications and sending them through serial monitor was quite straightforward. Although most of the code I found online was already deprecated, but that seems to be the nature of Android development.

I found an 8-bit neopixel strip. I coded an arduino to receive the serial message from the phone once it's available and go through each character in a loop and light up the 8-bit LED strip according to the binary representation of that character's ascii number.

Fabrication

As a developer, the coding part is usually what I find the easiest, and the enclosure and the fabrication is usually the hardest step for me. I started experimenting in Fusion360 with different ideas I had for a phone stand, below are two of them:

Given the timeframe we had, I decided to go with a more practical idea. ALthough I want to learn to design and make better enclosures and boxes that don't look like a student project, I needed to take one step at a time. I didn't want to use a website to generate templates. So I started 3D modeling what I had in mind. I first started by modeling a small piece to hold the USB connector in place, I measured and experimented with a few prints to achieve one that was a snug fit.

The rest of the box, I made a simple rectangular cube, as much as I hate the joints on it, it was the most practical option. I will for sure redesign this sometime in the future without those joints.

I also made this back support for the phone to hold it in place.

Next step was to make cardboard prototypes:

After trying to plug my phone in with this prototype it was clear that it was too tight for any phone with a case, I resized the box to have a better fit.

After making a couple more prototypes, we cut it on acrylic and glued them together. We intentionally chose neon bright reflective colors to have a certain aesthetic. We made two versions of it with corresponding neopixel colors.

This product comes with an app that you need to have in order to connect to it, you can also control whether you want it to show you binary or morse code.

Classmates' evaluation of our project.