With a few dozen boards to be manufactured and given the limited time frame, I decided to try my luck with an own reflow oven. I went for PCB-Pool’s approach that combines their PCB and stencil production services with a set of reflow tools for you to do the rest, i.e. baking the boards.

Applying the solder paste thru the stencil went really smooth and fast, while placing the components still took quite some time (but that was to be expected). The reflow itself was done in a few minutes and largely succesful, with just a few shorts across some pins of the one TSSOP chip with its 0.5mm pitch.

Looking forward to do more of this!

Here we found designer duo Christophe Vaillant and Ruth Weber, who were given the task of designing a glove with compartments to hold all the electronics, as well as a carrier for the sensors to be fixed to the fingers. Here’s a pic of an intermediate version:

Working with them was inspiring, also because we’re both into “desktop manufacturing”. E.g. for the sensor carriers they built their own deep drawing machine powered by a hoover:

(The pictures are theirs)

Second prototype, now complete with DC-DC converter and OpAmps for GSR and the optical pulse signal. The board matches the size of the Lantronix Matchport.

In there, the pulsing blood flow changes the amount of IR light that is reflected back to the photo transistor. The disadvantage is that this type of measurement is much more sensitive, in particular when the sensor moves against the skin.

In the background you can see the circular microphone array that feeds the analysis system. On the table there’s my ultrasound generator connected to the back of a cardboard speaker box.

My contribution will be a wireless GSR sensor to measure skin resistance and heart rate, while tracking will be accomplished by ubisense UWB tags.
The team includes psychologists, sociologists, researchers in art theory and visitor studies, musicians, artists, programmers, and designers.