This week I worked on a new task that Dr. Hofmann gave me to work on since I was pretty much all done with the benchmarks and demos for the swatch merge project. My new task was to create a custom scarf using the knitting machine for the Dean of Khoury (CS Department at Northeastern) for her to wear at her induction to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. On Monday I focused on brainstorming ideas for the design of the scarf and landed on the design of having ten butterflies, which were an important symbol of her career, being spaced a certain number of stitches a part that each represent a different milestone fo her career. Then LEDs will be incorpertaed into the design.

I spent this week creating a knittied pressure sensor for the circuit board and testing the swatch trace prototypes I created the week before. On Monday I created the code for the knittied sensor basing the design off a knitted sensor created in a previous paper called Knit UI and it came out pretty well.

This week I worked on finishing the design and prototype swatches for the custom circuit board demo which will be the third and final demo for the swatch merge project and finished the last aspect of the generalized maze code that will allow for holes on the sides and top to be created. On Monday I worked on updating the maze code and finished the design ideas for the circuit board demo.

This week I mainly spent time continuing my work on the code for all the swatch samples for the benchmarks of the project and also began working on the design of the stim board example that we will use for one of the three demos for the project. On Monday and Tuesday I worked on finishing all the code for the swatches for the benchmarks and knitting samples of them on the machine.

I spent most of this week working on creating and designing the benchmarks for the the swatch merge project. On Monday, I continued working on the brainstorming and writing of the descriptions for the benchmarks. By the end of the day, I had come up ideas for ten different benchmarks and three different demos for the project.

This week was mainly focused on working on my portion the swatch project that I’m helping with. On Monday, I spent the day brainstorming more ideas for swatch designs to be used as examples to demonstrate the alogirthms capabilities. I also spent some time learning how to create ribbing patterns on the machine.

On Monday, I worked mainly on finishing the maze idea. I worked throw the issues I was having with the initial prototypes and by the end of the day got the maze to knit exactly how I wanted which I was happy about! I also learned some knitting machine techniques to handle floats from dealing with these issues which I can carry on to future designs.

This week was fun. My dad came to Boston to visit me until Wednesday so each evening I went out to fun dinner spots with him and explored the city which was a lot of fun. On Monday, I went to pick up my new computer and spent a good amount of the day setting up that. I also worked on creating a new stim toy idea which would resemble one of the bubble pop toys.

The second week of the DREU program went well. On Monday, I went in to Northeastern to work on creating more samples on the knitting machine. I worked on some code for creating a 3D cylinder using the knitting machine in the morning and also worked on debugging a code I was having issues with the week prior. Then for the second half of the day, I mainly worked on knitting samples of the machine. I ended up running into an issue while using the machine so the day ended up being cut a bit shorter than expected.

My first week at Northeastern University consisted mainly of onboarding tasks and starting back up from where I left off with my project last summer. Since I conducted research with Dr. Megan Hofmann last summer through the DREU progran, I didnt have to do quite as many onboarding tasks. However this year, her lab, the ACT lab, is in the brand new EXP building on campus so I had to do some extra trainings to have access to the lab space. On Monday I was remote and worked on the said trainings to gain lab access and completed other miscellaneous onboarding tasks. In the evening, I explored the neighborhood I’m living in this summer and settled into my sublease.