The design brief was to create a toy based on a crayon drawing received from another group. Matt and Ellis gave us the drawing pictured above. We interpreted the toy to be a ball which would light up when thrown, and its color would signify how to the other player would react to it.

We decided that the best way to create a ball which could withstand the wear and tear of being thrown and kicked would be to create a frame and surround it with a soft material.

The frame went through two iterations, first we only three rings, this proved to not offer enough support. The second iteration had five rings and was much more stable. This method of making the frame allowed us to create a smashed geometric net of the ball on rhino, which we could then laser cut from foam fold around the ball.

The electronics and programming proved to be very challenging. Because the ball could not be wired, but the prompts would need to come from the computer screen, it was necessary to use a wireless XBEE, the XBEE had to be paired with the arduino in the ball and this proved to be very challenging as the XBEEs were very finicky. The programming was challenging because it was necessary to make the program wait for a certain amount of time before displaying something, but the wait command had been removed from the processing language and some very complicated nested loops were needed to get around the issue.