Urban Hacks was the idea of hacking the urban environment in a way that would affect everyone that interacts with the environment. After coming up with a bunch of ideas, we decided on making a hammock. We wanted people who walk by on the street to be able to sit down and relax or even take a nap at any time given in a more comfy option than a bench.

Our first brainstorm included all the ideas we originally wanted to put in our hammock. A lot of those extra ideas were cut as the project progressed but some were added. In the sketch, we wanted to add speakers on either side of the persons head. We also wanted to put a cupholder on one of the poles that the hammock would be connected to. Before we made a lifesized model and worried about putting those extras in, we made a smaller scaled model so we could be more comfortable with our concept and see if we wanted to change anything before we got into the lifesized model.

We used a little piece of fabric, laser cut some thin wood and used rope to get our first model up. It was onto the next model from there. The idea had seen a major change though. Instead of being hung on two poles, this hammock would be hung on one pole and be more like a seat. With that design change we decided to take out both the speakers and the cupholders because it seemed like those would just go to waste and add extra complication.

We got cracking on the first lifesized model of ours. We put in a support beam that would be above the hammock and would help connect both sides of the hammock together and have it hang from the pole. There wasn't much to the model originally so we had the idea of making it light up! With the support beam added it would be a good place to put an LED strip on. It makes the hammock seem more intriguing and more interactive. I spent a lot of time working with Arduino and the LED strips. At first, I just tried to get a very small bulb to light up which I was able to figure out. We thought it was too simple for the LED to be on all the time and that would drain the battery quickly so we wanted the LED lights to turn on once someone sat on the hammock. To make that possible I started working with the flex sensor as I still continued to figure out coding in Arduino. I continued to work with the small bulb light and it wasn't until later that I used the LED strip. Since they were both sources of light, it didn't matter much which I used, and the bulb took up less space and just made the process feel cleaner. Only difference would be the code for the lights. I already had a code ready for the LED strips where I would just have to edit it and put the specific amount of lights on the strip which was 25. Now, with everything working with Arduino, if the sensor received any flex, it would activate the LED strip. It was now time to put it in/on the hammock itself. We didn't put in the sensor until we worked on our final hammock.

After testing our first lifesized model, we thought it was good but we should make it a bit bigger and possible more comfortable. With the rope being yellow, we decided to paint all of the hammock yellow so it would look better. Our new fabric was already yellow so it was just a matter of painting the support beam. We also made a pocket in our fabric that we could place the Arduino board along with the battery in, which we needed for the lights to work. Lastly, we decided to update the look due to a small accident. We had a sit stencil we designed and we spraypainted onto the final model. While spraypainting, a breeze came through and spread the paint randomly, so we decided to do that all over the fabric which came out really well.