Over the past weeks, I was able to get my hands on and help out on both projects that are co-occurring. While at Metrix working on the blinky bike jacket with Blaine, Thuy, and Paige, Paige had to leave early, so Blaine, Thuy, and I stayed to work on the jacket. Thuy worked on sewing the conductive thread and securing the battery pack and lillypad in place on the jacket. Blaine and I worked on the wiring and I designed some plastic wafers, which were then created with a laser cutter. These were necessary in stabilizing the LED lights since we didn’t have any lillypad LEDs. After wiring the LEDs together, Blaine and I tested them and the blue lights wouldn’t light up, however, they would light up when they were not connected to the other LEDs. Later Matt from Metrix told us it would work if we used resistors. To bad it was getting late so we did not have time to do this. The three of us left around 9:40 pm from Metrix that night.

Recently I was able to lend a hand in helping out with the second Hackademia project with Brian, Thuy, Julius, and Amado. Their project was also a jacket, however, the LEDs would be placed on the hood of the jacket to look like eyes and have the LEDs’ brightness be adjustable, or so we hoped. They had an idea of how to carry out the plan, Julius and Brian would figure out the coding and me and Thuy would do the stitching. The lights were already positioned and I started out sewing the LEDs to the hood. Using alligator clips we tested the connections. After much fiddling the connections finally lit up. It was getting late, I finished the sewing and had to go home. Later on at our group meeting I got to see the jacket working but blinking instead. I also found out that the guys had the same issue with getting the blue LEDs to blink. I plan on helping with fixing this issue on their jacket.