This week I finally started working with the milling machine for aluminium and I’m really enjoying this process! I love this material and as more I work with it as more I want to build all my products with aluminium! It wasn’t actually very easy to understand how this machine worked at first, but after a couple of hours using it, I was already quite confident with the tools. The first thing I tried to accomplish was to create the top of the inside of the button. This took me about a full day in the workshop to make, however, I will have to build it all over again because I want to achieve the best result in terms of shine and flat surface.

The day after I focused only on the second component of the button, which was the end bottom of it. This was extremely more complicated to make because it needed to be very precise in order to match well with the top component.

When these two components were completed I then tried to see how the button looked sit on the charging dock… not so good!! I felt like it was one of those chunky emergency buttons… so I started to think for a better solution.

In the meantime, this week I also managed to complete the step 1 of the technology side of the project, which was to make it work! At the moment all it does is recharging the batteries inside the button, so it can show how the charging system work. All you need to do is placing the button on the top of the charging dock and it will recharge as well as showing a light that notifies the user that the product is actually charghing.

Currently, the LED light is blue, but I will have a try with different colours to see which one works best. However, I believe the white tonality would probably be best matched with aluminium.

Last but not least, towards the end of the week I had the brilliant idea to replace the charging dock… with a marble tile! In better words, the charging dock would be implemented into the tile with a square of the dimensions of approximately 10x10cm. This combination of aluminium + black marble looks actually really beautiful especially in the context of luxury hotels. Now I can finally see the project getting into shape!