Week #6: Time Capsule Part 2

This week our assignment was to create a prototype of our time capsule. I had a fun time with this because I got to study a little bit of a console I grew up with and loved as a child. 

For my time capsule, I thought of different storage boxes that would fit into the overall story of my time capsule. I thought of video game cases, cartridges and consoles. I ultimately decided on making the time capsule a video game console. The reason why is chose this because the older consoles that I grew up with, had disc compartments that opened upwards. So I looked into the older generation consoles with this mechanism. The final choices were the Sony Playstation 1 and the Nintendo Gamecube. I went with the Gamecube because I thought the Playstation 1 was a little too slim to fit some of the items in my time capsule. 

I started with a piece of cardboard and found the dimensions of a Gamecube online (because I could not find where I put my Gamecube). After measuring the sides out, I cut them out and drew a line 1 inch from the bottom going across the sides. This was to mimic the bottom base of the Gamecube. Then I colored in that bottom base a darker brown and hot glued all the sides together. 

After all the sides were glued, I cut out two sides to be the top and the bottom. I found a part of the cardboard that had a hole already cut in so I used that as the top piece. For the top piece, I also drew in two extra circles and the disc compartment outline. I also cut a small slit were the LED is on the GameCube. I'm not sure if I will actually add an LED to this, but regardless it added a little bit more depth to it. I also created a hinge for the top compartment and hot glued it to both the base and the top lid. 

On my Gamecube the Eject button is the hole; the reason I did this is because on an actual Gamecube, the Eject button opens up the disc compartment, so I thought it mirrored the original in a way. I also cut out holes for each controller port and the two memory card slots. I plan on using these in the future for the Arduino that will go in here. 

I worked on this time capsule on campus and I forgot to bring all of my items with me, so I couldn't work on how they would fit into the capsule. But I have a general idea of creating a mounting area for the Arduino and creating memory cards that can be opened and will serve as a smaller time capsule. 

Lego Story-boarding

For the class exercise, we had to story board with Legos about interesting things we saw on our commute to school. My commute to school is mostly riding the subway and a little bit of walking. So I thought of the interesting things I could remember either while riding the train or waiting for a train. While I was thinking, I just played with the Legos and created the first item on the left, some weird creature. Then I remembered seeing the Empire State Building while walking with different lights lit up. So I created the top of the building from my memory and used the two colored clear Legos to represent the lights. One thing I also remembered was once while exiting a subway station, the turn stile wasn't working, it was just stuck. To present this, I used the spinning X Lego and the clear block to restrict the movement of the "turnstile" while remaining "invisible". From there I also remembered seeing MTA workers working on the tracks late at night when I was on my way home. So I used the ladder and the only human Lego pieces to portray the MTA worker going down to work on the tracks. Finally, on my way back I always like to start out when the train crosses the Brooklyn bridge. So I tried to create the train going over a bridge with my last piece.