Day 6
Day 6 - Notes & Details: To me, the sixth and final day of the residency carried a weight that none of the previous days did — it was the day everything either came together or it didn't, and that pressure was felt from the moment we walked in.
We began with a brief by Vaibhav sir covering outstanding makers and some of the most significant projects that have come out of Makers Asylum over the years. It was grounding in the best way — a reminder of the standard this space holds and what purposeful making actually looks like at its best. We also got an introduction to the OSHWA open source hardware licence, which was genuinely useful context for where Project Vector could go beyond this residency if we choose to put it out into the maker community properly.
Once that wrapped up we moved straight into the most physically demanding part of the entire build — sticking all the layers together and connecting everything to the PCB. This sounds straightforward on paper but the reality of managing 12 pads worth of wiring in one coherent structure is something that only becomes clear when you are actually doing it. The wires almost immediately became the central problem. With every pad having its own piezo wires, LED wires, and power connections all running toward a single PCB, the tangling became severe enough that it was genuinely obstructing the assembly.
The fix we landed on was an elegant one — we elevated the pads slightly and routed all the wiring beneath them, using the space under each pad as a hidden channel. It cleaned up the entire build visually and made the routing far more manageable, which was one of those solutions that felt obvious only after we found it.
Final assembly followed and the moment we powered everything on was one I will not forget quickly. The overwhelming majority of components responded exactly as they should — LED rings lighting up, piezos registering clean hits, the full system behaving like an actual product rather than a prototype. One or two pads did not respond as expected and we have set aside time with Dakshat sir tomorrow morning to diagnose and fix those before we can call Project Vector fully complete. But for the first time across six days, we could see the whole thing working in front of us — and that felt like enough.
