Brief - Julian Kennedy

 Poor air quality is a significant global health issue that is not going away. Well over 4 million deaths a year are attributed to outdoor air pollution. The "Lichen Limb" is an air-purifying arm prosthetic that uses lichen to help humans now, and to prepare them to adapt to and mitigate air pollution issues projected for the future. Like all plants, lichen naturally scrubs excess co2 from the air, but unlike most plants, it does not need dirt to survive. This makes it the perfect natural, mobile, co2 scrubber. 

Many similar natural air-purifiers use algae and an air pump to scrub co2. The "Lichen Limb" instead uses lichen because it is lighter, easier to maintain, and does not require electricity to operate. The device is designed with internal air tunnels lined with lichen that scrub away excess co2 as air passes through. The lichen tunnels spiral around a 3D-printed cone-shaped base. The tunnels are spiraled in order to maximize surface area, and two hinged pieces of clear acrylic fit around the base in order to air seal the tunnels. These features improve the efficiency of the co2 scrubbing. The "Lichen Limb" was designed as a prosthetic for practicality and social impact. The device is rather bulky and would be very difficult to attach to someone is fully limbed. Designing it as a prosthetic for below the elbow amputees allows for the necessary size of the device. Along with the goal of air purification, the "Lichen Limb" hopes to empower different limbed peoples and destigmatize disability.

Brief - Hagar Hirsch

The Lichen Limb is a prosthetic arm that hosts lichen that naturally filters toxins and provides clean air for the user. According to The United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality, living in Boston for a year one takes in a number of toxins equivalent to living with a smoker for three months. Air pollution levels in Boston, as well as worldwide, are only projected to get worse. In order to combat this lichen is the ideal choice. It acts as a natural, portable, filter as it is both very hardy and also efficient at air filtration.

The prosthesis has been modeled to fit Jul, who is a below the elbow amputee. We spoke to her about creating a comfortable prosthetic and also about what routes we could take to make the prosthetic more useful. In order to create a comfortable attachment, we are using foam padding. All mechanisms have been designed to be operated with one hand. The prosthesis contains a drill-shaped spiral to encourage air flow and to make watering the lichen easier; the outside shell contains a spring-based latch to make the device easy to open. The Lichen Limb seeks to provide a natural and streamlined solution to air pollution as well as approaching prosthesis. The Lichen Limb doesn’t replace the function of a hand. Our project sought to explore how prosthetics could be made that challenge the human form instead of replicating it.

Creators: Sofia Carlson, Haley Roach

1. My project is a short term memory snake-like game that required an immense amount of effort to create. The soldering was fairly easy, but it was tedious since there were so many connections. Programming took almost all the focus. The way that I soldered might have been efficient for me in the beginning, but I soon ran into problems with coding very quickly. Mr. Smith helped during the coding process and filled me in on any knowledge I lacked. The one who really brought the code together was Rosa. She created an equation to help me with the struggles of movement on my LED light strips. Some of the feedback I received was, "a cool idea, but there is a long way to go before it is a game." I completely agree with that comment as well. I have come a very long way, but there is still so much that I still need to code for. Right now a maze pops up that you need to remember, and you can use the joystick to move through to make the maze, but there is no way for me to score it, which doesn't really make it a game. That is something I should focus on over the summer if I have the opportunity. 

2. If I had another month to work on the project, I am certain it would be as great as Pac-Man (not really). I could work on the scoring system and the accuracy test and the rest of the physical needs. I could make it an arcade machine and paint it. I would make it a true game. 

3. The hardest thing about my project was the movement command to "go down". This was extremely hard because the way I wired my LED strips were side-to-side. This created a problem that If I wanted to move straight down, I wouldn't just move down 1 or to the side 12, we had to create a formula that worked to go from, say 11-23 and 4-19 and 7-16. If you look there is no easy way to get one simple number to solve this. Fortunately for me, Rosa was in the innovation lab for a few periods and decided to help me with my struggles. She created a perfect equation that works every single time, so without her, my project would have been way behind schedule or I might have not even found a way to "move down".

4. The most important thing that I learned to do was to keep looking at the same thig a different way. Perspective changes everything. If I didn't see the solution right in front of my face, I needed to change the way I looked at the situation and almost every time by the 3rd time I changed my POV, I found a way. I was trying to work on the "up" function, but was running into the same problems as the "down" function. By some time I eventually thought, "Instead of going up, why don't I move up 2 and then go down once. This was a breakthrough in my mind because I was utilizing a function that already existed instead of making a new one. Overall my project was a big struggle, but somehow I got through it. In my mind, it was a  huge success and I am extremely happy with the way everything came out. It's not finished, but I am still very proud. 

Thesis: We are making sensory boards for High Horses to help with occupational therapy. Our goal is to make a sensory board to help someone open a bottle cap. We have different sized caps with different handles on the top to help them open it, they can start on the easiest one and work their way down to the hardest one. Inside the bottles will be a prize like a candy or toy so they will want to open it.

Feedback: Some feedback that we got was that we should add more color to make it more interesting and inviting, we also need to add directions so people know what they need to do.

Next Steps: Our next steps are to laser cut directions into it so people know what they need to do, paint the bottles and caps to make it more interesting, and connect the caps and strings to the board so they don't fall off. 

Prompt: The prompt for this quarter's IDEA class was to create a musical intervention. The musical invention would be placed in the front walkway to draw people up the walkway and into the building. It would represent our school as innovative and interesting to visitors and passersby. Our group chose to address this prompt by making a ceiling xylophone that would be operated by pulling down cranks to hit certain notes. The reason for the notes on the ceiling was to keep the pipes out of dangers way such as weather or people. In the rest of this post I will go into deeper detail of the project.

Precedents: Our final product closely resembles the Cornell Chimes. The hitting system is very similar to this wonderfully simple music machine. A link to the Cornell Chimes is here .

Description of Final Project/Intervention: The intervention is a ceiling xylophone. The xylophone included many things that make it stand out from any other xylophone such as a crank system and a resetting hitter system. The cranks are placed six inches apart so they are far enough that two people can play them but not far enough that one person cannot play two. The self resetting system is a rubber band attracted to the hitter  so after the hitter hits the ceiling it is pulled back down to it's original position. The rubber band is made out of a flexible rubber that our coach, Max Vanatta, bought us.

Challenges: One of the challenges that came on later on in our project is the hammer length. As our project moved on we realized that we might need a different hammer length for each key but than Will came up with a brilliant idea. We had to measure the middle of the longest pipe and then we could center all the other pipes around the longest one.

How to play our Final Project: The way to play the ceiling xylophone is simple, just pull the correct lever for the desired note and the hitter will hit the correct note.

Next Steps: After all this explanation, my group has not finished our project. We still need to hang the pipes on the ceiling and drills holes into the brick wall to attract the hitting mechanism to the wall. We also need to attract the bungee cords to the hitting mechanism so everything can reset. And finally, we need to test and make sure everything works and then we will finally be finished.

Link for Video for the 4: https://youtu.be/p7jEMdKbnAU