Hello everybody,
This was our first session in the fablab where we would actually work on creating our physical prototype interactive gymmat. The interactive gymmat uses a projector which projects puzzles and gyms on a gymmat with touchsensors that in turn registers the actions of the child and report it back to the computer. We needed a cheap way to make some sort of touch sensors and thanks to Alex we stumbled upon this great project.
We decided that the gymmat needed 9 touchsensors and thus needed to be devided in nine areas. Thus we decided to use the keyboard's numlock keys (1 to 9) as touchsensors. We started by opening the keyboard and found out that there were three layers of plastic sheet on top of each other. The upper- and lower ones have conductive wiring on them. The middle one with the holes keeps the upper- and bottom layer from connecting until you press a key.
Next we needed to isolate the circular areas which corresponded to the numlock keys we used. We isolated the numlock keys by putting tape on the surrounding areas.
We then created small holes in the circles, this was done so we could attach the wires later on.
We attached small conductive wires, so that these wires can be attached to the conductive wires of the interactive gymmat. We attached the wires by first cutting 9 black (which is the top sheet) and 9 red (which is the bottom sheet) wires of equal length, strip 1 cm of isolation of the wire on both ends and insert it throug the topsheet at the topside (where there is no conductive lines). The wire was then sticked in a piece of aluminum foil on the bottom side that was foiled a couple of times around it. You feed the stripped part of one side of the wire through this hole in the aluminum foil and repeat this process 18 times until every wire has a piece of foil attached on one side of it.
When the wire is through we bend it 180 degrees so that it forms a hook, this way it won’t get pulled out by accident.
And to ensure that the foil properly connected with the circles we applied some tape on both sides so it wouldn't go anywhere.
Images are going to be replaced by images of our project, but for now the images of the dance mat project pretty accurately describe our innovation proces.
