My favorite thing at maker faire, was definitely the Pancake Bot. But since Charlotte already posted about that, I decided to write about these two dancing robots (to Gangnam Style) every 20 minutes. They were pretty good!
Author: Mansi Gupta
Macarons!!
I love macarons! And I found this great tutorial on how to make some! I’ve never actually tried to make them before, but this tutorial is really great at laying out the materials and the pictures are beautiful, even thought she only makes white macarons. Enjoy! 
How to make a fish tail braid
I wanted to post a hair tutorial because as a child, I always wanted long hair and wanted to experiment with it. I went with a fish tail because it’s a little more complicated than a french braid and one I have never tried on my own hair. This tutorial does a pretty good job of explaining and accompanying with pictures. I also like that it starts off with all the pictures and then goes into a detailed explanation of the steps.
How to make a reversible Tote Bag
I decided to post this bag tutorial because I’ve always wanted to learn how to make bags and because this one makes it seem really uncomplicated and fairly easy to do (if I knew how to sow!). I like that it broke it up in parts – straps, the body, and lining and had pictures to accompany each step. I also liked that it numbered the pictures and had steps written with corresponding numbers. I also liked that it had links to make similar or matching products at the end of the tutorial.
Finished!
The Assertive-ert
I continued to work on a 3D Privacy Device for our first Arduino projects. I also decided to continue working on the Space Creator. In this project, I used an IR sensor to sense distance and I sowed on LED lights to the shirt as the output. I was a little ambitious in the beginning as I wanted to sow on a whole message, but being a first time sower, I just decided to be short and sweet.
To make this shirt, I used conductive thread to sow on the LEDs. Becky’s LED embroidery tutorial was extremely helpful in this part. I then connected the lights to the Arduino board that holds my IR sensor. I have stitched on the board to the shirt and it’s running on a 9V battery to make it completely wireless (well kind of).
The major issue I faced is that only part of the lights on my shirt are extremely bright. I had trouble trying to spread out the power equally over the 19 LEDs I used.
3D Privacy Device
I’m thinking of taking my space creator further for this week’s Arduino project. I’ve spent some time today working with an IR sensor. The most useful link I found to learn the basics of this was a distance calculation project.
Through this, I was able to switch on an LED when the sensor reads an obstacle. I also found this project which details LED-IR led arduino instructions with some helpful links.
The Space Creator
To create a 3D Privacy Device, I dived into the research process by asking friends about when they felt a privacy breach and wished for a device to prevent that. A lot of answers I received were around their identity on the internet. By far, the cutest story was from my friend, Mel, who was very embarrassed as a seventh grader when her father found her diary, read it, and found out about her crush on the Filipino boy in class. Anyhow, I decided to make a “space creator” for this project. Watch and enjoy!
The space creator is a somewhat scary piece of clothing that creates a physical space around your unattended body – the back. It is inspired from having grown up in India where there is essentially no sense of physical space.
I used a tube shirt, double sided tape and artists tape to create this prototype. The bright colors make it cute and fashionable!
Let me know if you need to borrow it 😉
Mansi Gupta
Hi, I’m Mansi! I grew up in India, mostly in a boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas. I studied Computer Science and Economics at Bryn Mawr College, and then lived in San Francisco and London before moving to New York.
I love dance, Tibetan food, fashion, mountains and views, and cowboy boots. London is my favorite city, but Bhutan is the most beautiful place I’ve ever bribed anyone to visit – that’s me in the photo above, in Bhutanese clothes in Bhutan.
In college, I developed a computing curriculum for middle school students. Here is a life size maze we built for the students to steer their robots around in:
I’ve mostly seen design from a computing and programming stand point. I’m excited to learn and work on more hands-on projects in this class. I’ve recently begun chatting with independent designers in NYC and I write about them in this blog. If you ever need a pseudo expert at Indian cooking or Bollywood, please come find me!