Newsletter #11
Our parts arrived! It was a relief to see all of the boxes when we had returned from San Francisco. We spent some time on Monday unboxing everything and checking the contents against the shipping manifest since we’d hate to be short on a part later down the road! Right away Jason and Elwin began testing the components such as the LEDs, power supplies, speakers, and servos to make sure everything worked. Anisha began construction of one of the servo mounts for the Mirrors installation, and Yotam started to populate all of the tasks into a task calendar leading to Soft Opening, our third milestone.
Jason focused on the technology for Jars this week, finalizing the code base for the installation and testing our newly designed PCB. We also planned out how the interaction of the jar should be handled and how the switch will react when we close the lid. Elwin designed the central core of the jar which will house the electronics such as the PCB, microphone, and speaker. Yotam and Anisha coordinated with Hobby Lobby to order our jars at a discount, and practiced drilling a hole into the jar to route a power cord. Anisha finalized the internal structure of the Mirrors installation as well as the false wall panel for the Jars. She spoke with the materials providers and had them approve and prepare our orders – we’re expecting those materials next week! We’re really proud of how we’ve been handling challenges and being flexible with new materials and unfamiliar territory.
Looking Forward
We’re very aware of our time constraint and we feel confident in our construction deadline. The pieces are visibly falling into place and we’re looking forward to the structural materials arriving next week so we can start putting it all together. Things are moving very quickly so we are constantly vigilant about anything that might slow us down; we’ve been in touch with each other constantly and regularly meet to update each other about our progress.
Finally, we’ll start planning out our poster next week and figuring out how we want to discuss the exploration and fabrication we’ve been doing as part of this project.
Current Challenge
Our biggest challenge is keeping the fire strong so that we can fabricate these two installations in their entirety. We are confident with our tasks moving forward and we have been keeping a keen eye on our operations.
We also have a better sense of our budget now and we are able to firmly project what is left to buy. Fortunately, our projection lands us within our budget but not by a huge margin so we have to be mindful of anything going wrong that would cause an additional spike in our budget.