After looking at the images of tattoos that I posted recently and thinking about my ideas for the project I decided there was only one thing for it and that was to break out the felt tips and get something on paper.
I wasn't too bothered exactly what i drew but I knew that just the act of putting pen to paper would help to crystallise my ideas by giving me something to look at and think about.
I knew I wanted to represent a museum gallery and exhibits in it. So I drew a circle with eight more circles around it. I coloured the circles in and joined the small circles to the larger one. Then drew lines from the larger circles to the top of the paper imagining that the wires are the veins and arteries going to the heart.
I repeated this seven more times in different but similar patterns all on the same sheet of paper.
Its not the best photo but you get the idea.
That was when I had my first insight. This could get really complicated. It was fairly easy to do on paper and it didn't matter if lines crossed but doing this on a sleeve with conductive thread could be complicated and prone to failure.
Next step was to repeat the exercise but simplified the patterns to make the routing of the wiring simpler. I also drew a couple of lines in there to make me think about the wires for the power.
I could see straight away that although better than my first attempt there would be problems. Second insight of the night, think in 3D I would be working with a sleeve so I have a cylinder not a flat plane. This means that I can wrap wires around to make connections. Even though how I had drawn it wasn't the best design it lead to that flash. So decided to test my theory.
This is probably the first real prototype in that it was a physical test of an idea rather than a flat drawing. It only took a few moments to make by making a quick sketch then rolling up and sellotaping the paper, but that has probably saved me several hours testing out the same idea with LEDs and wires.
The next two things I want to think about are testing out the colour sensor and the electronics needed to control all the LEDs that I'm planning on using.
Don't actually have my kit yet but hopefully shouldn't be long now.Will post my thoughts about it when I do.
