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.

The final product, after two days of work, was a multi player game, where you would pass the ball and depending on the color shown, you would either "knee"  or catch the ball.  The structure consists of 5 rings laser cut into 1mm plastic material, with notches to stabilize them into place.  The sphere structure is covered by 8 foam strips laser cut to fit the circumference of the rings.  The strips are hot glued together and onto the plastic ring edges.  One of the strips is detachable through velcro.  The detachable feature allows accessibility to the electronics inside.  Two extra foam circles are hot glued to the top and bottom of the ball where the foam strips meet.  There are pipe cleaners that cover up the glue, and add a little texture. 

    The electronics inside consist of an arduino, an XBEE (that connects to the wifi), an accelerometer, and a battery.  With this setup velcroed down in the ball, it connects to the application on the computer which is called Processing.  With all these electronics programmed, the computer waits for the ball to be still for approximately two seconds, then shows either red or blue.  When the color appears, the person throws the ball.  The other person must either knee or catch the ball.  Red means catch it, and blue means knee it.  Once the person has the ball still in their hands, the process repeats.