hacking it with the -ta team

I‘ve just spent a week with the Unbox Caravan and the -ta team, and it has been one of the best weeks of my student life. I have always had a fascination for hacking things, and making them work, so when Jon Rogers came to town with the Unbox Caravan in tow, I’ve barely slept enough this week, such has been the level of excitement and work.

It is difficult to condense a weeks worth of work in one post, so I shall just run by the highlights.

• I bought an Arduino Uno in 2014, didn’t know how to operate it beyond the basic ‘Blink’ function, hence I kept in cupboard till January of 2016.
• 30th January, there is a massive kerfuffle in forming groups between the students of Exhibition and Product design. I emerge from the scrum with the best possible team. Team members include Uttishta Varanasi, Nikita Arora, Ishita Jain, myself, and a bonus member, Vishwanath Pasumarthi. We not only have Exhibition and Product designers, but a couple of Graphic designers as well. The team is cleverly named -ta team by me, and my name is also changed to Salilta with effect from 2/01/2016. Basic research is done into the definition of what makes a home in the pols of Ahmedabad. Nikita loses large chunks of her mind while ideating, and copiuous amounts of laughter ensues.
• 31st January, and I’m collecting parts for the Design Workshop course, and I have to go for a lie down, after getting overly excited on reading the list of parts available at the store. Uttisht does some terrible bargaining and saves us some money. But he now supply the entire class with high quality kits, and everyone bought from him after their terrible chinese made Arduinos go up in smoke.
• 1st February, I find out that Jon Rogers isn’t actually a human, but some other form of being. I don’t know what, but I am determined to find out. We get cracking with our Arduino IDE and quickly learn how to make simple circuits and get upto speed with coding with relative ease.
• 2nd February, the members of the Unbox Caravan present themselves, and we get to know who they are. Turns out, they’re all just a bunch of eager and excited individuals who just can’t wait to get their hands dirty and make something. I cannot wait to get working with them. Vishwanath and I take David and Emily(from Unbox Caravan) on a small tour to show them the makers of Ahmedabad. We visit Kalamkhush to see hand made paper being made, and some exquisite hand assembled mechanical charkhas. We then go visit Geeta Mandir where we see how the wood suppliers and furniture makers of Ahmedabad operate. I meet some old friends at S.P. Jogi, and introduce them to my new friends from the Unbox Caravan. The Jogi brothers had just bought a new lathe machine, and were extremely excited to show it off and explain everything about their business. On returning to campus, I continue my investigation on the being known as ‘Jon Rogers’, and I can definitely confirm that this being is in no way, shape, or manner, the human it claims to be. This entity is composed of pure excited, fidgety energy, and not the 45-something human being as described.
• 3rd February, and the -ta team gets down and dirty with code. Unfortunately Jon Rogers sent a code truck(with a massive amount of complex code), and we get flattened. Fortunately, the -ta team pulls through with a recovery operation, and by late night we start to make some cool stuff with the Arduino and sensors. Vishwanath cracks some important bits of code, and saves the day. Difficult day this. We also start ideating on our ideas of what a ‘connected home’ should be like, and sketch out our ideas. Some ideas turn out to be shit. Not actually shit, but about shit. We think of a toilet that measures your shit and tells you what you ate. Happily we also have other great ideas to work on. Ishita uses her graphic talent, and all our idea sketches look pretty ****ing wicked. I pat myself on my talentless back on getting her on the -ta team. In other news, Nikita falls asleep mid-conversation.
• 4th February, our ideas are further developed, and worked upon. The idea of writing and documenting what we do is discussed, and Medium is chosen as the medium of choice. I publish my first post, a pictorial definition of the word ‘despair’ using Ishita’s face. Ishita is not happy, and the aforementioned post is censored to avoid legal conflict. We get our hands on some more cool sensors and cool input switches. Uttisht hooks up some sweet circuits, and it all runs wonderfully with code written by Nikita and me. We spend the whole day making circuits and writing code in preparation for making prototypes the next day. Nikita and I go get milkshake with Jon, Jayne, Shashank, Praveen, and members of a rival team. A bubble making device is acquired. The said bubble making machine created much shock and awe in the studio. Productivity drops to rock bottom levels, and much slo-mo trickery is recorded when Nikita loses control of hands when bought in presence of soap bubbles.
• 5th February, the day is spent preparing prototypes, and I get a crash course in Firmata, Python, and Raspberry Pi, with David Ascher, Michael Henretty, and Bobby Richter. They very patiently sit with me-a code n00b-and hook up a Raspberry Pi to an Arduino. I get very very excited working with the said Raspberry Pi, which has a Sensehat shield with neopixel LED goodness, and consequently forget a lot of what they taught me. While I figured out this code, and hardware dilemma, the -ta team successfully builds and codes a prototype which forms a human circuit. The rather excellent prototype and idea recieves some great feedback from Jon, and we continue to add more meaning and functionality to the concept. Thus concludes a great week with lots to process over the weekend.
• BONUS: 6th February, Mike and I plan to work on the weekend to figure out the Raspberry Pi-Arduino dilemma, and work together in the afternoon to try and hook them up together. What actually happens is Mike once again sits patiently teaching me basics of Unix programming, and how to make a github repository. Although I already should’ve known basic Unix and github commands before, we manage to get some more degree of success with the integration, but the lack of a decent microphone lets us down, and a foray into the depth of Ahmedabad leads us to a dead end. Further ideation takes place, and the final idea is getting some definition.