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.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I worked on design the butterfly and writing code to create the prototype designs on the knitting machine. I went through a few interations of them to get it exactky how I wanted and by the end of Wednesday I had the final design of it that I really liked.

Thursday and Friday I spent working on the design of the traces to connect each butterfly which took some time. After many interations I figured out the appropriate designs for each of the traces and determined the correct distance for each to represent the amount of time between each miletstone. Then I knitted samples of each trace and once they all looked good I knitting the first full scarf prototype showcasing the full design. From there, Dr. Hofmann and one of her new PhD students are going to incorporate LEDs into the design at specific locations using conductive yarn to connect them and a small battery pack to power the circuit.