Inspiration
During our first year attending UT, we often found ourselves sitting on the patio outside of our dorm in the glow of the tower. We learned, through this, of how much our student body and faculty achieved--awards, grants, games, all lauded through this visual herald. After we left that dorm, we realized that not everyone has as great of a view of the tower as we did, and that because of this people lose the connection they had to their university. The UT Tower lights orange to celebrate the achievements of its students and faculty, and someone who takes pride in their university might want to have that connection to its achievements. The TableTower allows someone who isn't able to see the tower to continue to be connected.
What it does
Whenever the Tower is orange, the TableTower lights up orange.
How I built it
TableTower is an edge-lit, laser etched acrylic art-piece. The different panels allow us to manipulate configurations so that we can accurately convey the same message as the Tower. We laser cut the panels in the Longhorn Maker Studio prior to HackTX. We worked with Arduino Pro Minis to set the light configurations. We used an esp8266 to receive wi-fi signals. We built a back-end that scrapes information to determine which configuration the tower should replicate, and deployed it on Azure.
Challenges I ran into
Initially we had planned to use a chain of LEDs to light the acrylic, but after building the circuits and writing the code necessary to test this method, we found that the domes on the LEDs were too diffused to work. We attempted to cut the LED domes and tried using sandpaper to shape the LEDs, but in the end nothing we did changed our outcome. We decided to swap our LEDs for an LED strip, which supplies light at a much less diffused rate.
The wi-fi module (esp8266) was finicky, and sometimes wouldn't accept a flash.
Since TableTower is a multimicrocontroller project, we had to be very conscious of how things interacted with each other.
The LED strip we checked out had a short circuit built in, and melted upon plug-in.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We finished. The problems we encountered were larger than we initially expected, and we ended up scrapping nearly three hours worth of work, but the end result is what we dreamed it would be despite our hardships.
What I learned
I am not more familiar with the Arduino IDE, and now I have a deeper understanding of MOSFETS. I learned about LED Driving circuits, and about the limitations of current drivers. My partner learned about embedded servers, and inter-controller communication. He also learned about using Azure.
What's next for TableTower
We would like to see if the Co-op might be interested in mass producing and selling a product similar to TableTower, since it's something a Texas-Ex might enjoy. We produced a smaller version, TinyTableTower, which is more suitable to being placed on a desk than being a centerpiece, and we would like to produce a larger version with a functional clock.
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