Final Project Brain Storming
With a great passion for innovation and design, along with many hobbies, such as freediving, spearfishing, cooking, automotive racing, film photography, playing guitar, just to name a few, it makes rather difficult for me to decide on a final project idea.
Finding a need to solve, is something I find quite easy. Particularly, when it’s to do with a hobby of mine. In fact, I have along list of needs waiting to be solved. When I heard about Fab Academy, I got super excited and felt that this is the perfect opportunity to start tackling my list.
I know I’m supposed to pick only one idea, but I’d like to share my thought process in case someone out there gets inspired by one the below needs and decides to solve it. Here goes nothing.
Wave LED
One thing I love about my job is when an architect or lighting designer comes up with a crazy cool, but challenging design that nobody has implemented before. This one was for a tower by the beach, that needed to be lit up with controllable RGB LEDs, and the architect wanted the motion of the waves to be artistically featured on the tower in real-time. The two main solutions I proposed are image processing the waves or sound dedication using filters to pick out the relevant frequencies.
Jado
Since freediving and spearfishing have played a huge role in my life, I’m leaning mostly towards an idea in this field, as it’s a lot more interesting when a project is passion-driven. Last weekend, during an overnight spearfishing trip on a dhow (large traditional Qatari wooden yacht), one of my friends, Jad, attempting to transfer from the dhow to a fishing boat got badly injured. Unexpected waves up to 10ft high rocked the fishing boat aggressively. We took turns to jump on, Jad was the last one left. As he attempted to jump on, we see him slip and his sole skin gets caught up in between the dhow and fishing boat as they rock into each other. Blood was everywhere, a very deep and long cut was the result. We were 80km away from land, with no cell reception. Thankfully, we had a first aid kit handy and managed to temporarily treat him until the ambulance helicopter arrives to the closest port. Therefore, I was inspired to design and build a bridge platform that allows safe transfer from yachts to fishing boats, without injury or boat damage.
Coconut Sheller
As one of my favorite fruits, mature coconuts can be extremely tedious to break open, especially if you try to only remove the shell, while keeping the endosperm intact. It’s almost impossible. While experimenting many times during my time in Manchester, I realized that the secret was to loosen the tension in the shell. However, hitting the shell results in breaking it and more often that not, you end up breaking the fragile endosperm. Sawing it down, however, works quite well. Therefore, I came up with a concept to saw down only the thickness of the shell, around the circumference of the coconut. However, I never got the chance to prove the concept with a prototype. To make sure electronics are used, my design could adopt a motor, making the process possible with only the push of a button.