The first weekly assignment for Intro to Fabrication involves building a flashlight.
From early on I was interested in building a user unfriendly flashlight—one which only lights up when a collection of switches is in a certain configuration. While also thinking about Ben’s story behind this assignment, I decided that the magic configuration which would turn on the flash light should be the birthday of someone close from my family—September 26th, 1966.
I am using the binary representation of the day, month and year in order to spell out this particular date using switches, as follows: on the first row, we have 5 bits for the day (since days are between 1 and 31). On the second row, we have 4 bits for the month (between 1 and 12). On the third row, we have 7 bits for the last two digits of the year (between 0 and 99.)
The flashlight is a simple box, with switches on one side, and 5 LEDs on a different side. In terms of materials, I went for plywood. The fabrication process involved using the laser cutter in order to get the box faces, soldering for the electric circuit and a messy hot glue gun to bring everything together.
