Obama Summit Cubes
In Fall 2019 the Obama Summit was held on Illinois Tech’s campus in the brand-new Kaplan Building. The staff of the Idea Shop was asked to make table ornaments for the event.
We did it in the most over-engineered way possible, using the internet of things.
The finished product, when the LEDs inside the cubes were dim the Illinois Tech logo was completely invisible.
RGB LEDs inside the cube were driven by transistors controlled by an ESP32 microcontroller connected to a Wi-Fi access point. Originally, the access point was used to control if the cubes were on-and-off to limit their power consumption (many used only 9V batteries).
I experimented with a few ways to make the cubes interactive, and came up with the idea to make them controlled by detecting “taps” on the cubes using an accelerometer.
Here are the bare bones of the cubes, the circuit was entirely hidden in the center tube so it wouldn’t block any light in the cubes.
Since they were already connected on a network, I wanted to have the cubes “trigger” the operation of other cubes on the network.
Working with a team, we developed a solution: when activated with a tap each cube would broadcast a packet on the network that would trigger the others.
We designed a PCB using DipTrace, milled it out in our shop, and produced 5 cubes for the event.
Overall, it was a good learning and teamwork experience for me. I got a lot of exposure to PCB design, and they actually put some of our cubes in the Obama’s green room!