Well Done SEA, Every Point Deserved. First Ever.

Potential circuit for the on/off of the "smartphone opera house" lights. You could power the whole stand off of the 5V iPhone USB cable, taking a parallel path for the LEDs and the phone charger.

Dead center in the schematic is a relay that would control power to the LEDs. The relay could be pulled by some sort of signal from the iPhone's USB jack (the line coming from top left). I kind of hope that the iPhone sends some momentary Tx signal on the USB when it wakes up for an alarm but this is an assumption; its hard to find information on an Apple product. In any case, assuming some kind of transient signal could be pulled off of the iPhone the relay would be pulled closed and then self-latch, keeping the LEDs on. In order to manually turn the lights on and off, a double pole, double throw switch (ignore the SPDT label) could be used (which is shown as two separate switches, 1 and 2). To turn off the lights after the phone has turned them on you would turn the lights manually on, connecting 1 and disconnecting 2, then back to off, which would momentarily break the self-latch circuit.    

Table Design sketches. Much of sketch credit here goes to M. Baxter.

More first iteration of incandescent project.

For the second light project, my group and I went about building a heated cardboard pillow.  We played with scoring cardboard to change its inherent physical properties.

Day one: LED and paper project. Phone opera house, projects sound and light. Collaborator: Brian Drake (I'll miss ya buddy)

Quick sworks of a potential group table. Tri, top, and side views. streetlightchanger 

Mega update: after breadboarding up the latch circuit I found it would not toggle with a finger contact due to the high impedance of fingers. So step one was tracking down some 10MΩ resistors to up the impedance of the the whole thing. I decided that to keep the final assembly small I would do a “dead bug” circuit rather than a board. Next, I made some touch contacts out of copper shim—antennae for my bug. The process photos really illustrate the technique’s namesake. My first dead bug circuit came out successful, but it is quite a tedious method. Only recommended if you have a few zen hours to burn. Next, I cut my newly procured Mylar sheet into the appropriate sizes to create the body. Because I had a large sheet I upped the size of the largest cut above 8.5x11, which had always looked a bit anemic. I also glued up my scrap base: a glass sheet (carefully!) extracted from the glass scrap and some scrap plywood from the shelving project. Really I think they came away with a nicely complimentary color palate for being found materials.

Pictures of a dry fit of the table, and the fracture that kept me from gluing. I was considering doing some finishing of the plywood (wood bleach) and sapele (more sanding) separately, and when a hinge fractured during a careless dry fit it convinced me to hold off on gluing. In this table's near future is a hinge repair inlay, sanding and I think some tung oil.

Divider storage in action.

A mobile divider benbasseches captainwhiskeycadillac bradherz atlasdesignstudio

Process shots of the group table project.

Great strides in storagability. atlasdesignstudio benbasseches bradherz pgolyski