Thursday 10/14 (42 days left)

So we arrived in class, largely wordlessly, on Thursday to present our afunctional project. We were all mad/disappointed/overtired/possibly concussed (well maybe that was just me). We presented third, surrounded fully by groups who stripped down their design and made something functional rather than formal or conceptual. I think the best phrase used to describe our week was "eyes larger than our stomachs". Instead of going with something we knew we could make work, we attempted to go above and beyond to combine it with an interesting concept, but ultimately failed to do so. 

The teachers (or at least John) described it as a "courageous failure", and I remember thinking to myself that courageous or not, failure was not acceptable. I brooded during the final presentation, ate by myself, and cooled off in time for our trip to the exhibition space we will be using in December. The space was interesting, and the bus trip to and from the NCRC gave us an interesting opportunity to interact between groups. Until then my experience with members of the class that weren't my group was limited, but this was an interesting way to meet a few of my classmates.

I think the most striking space in the NCRC was the large exhibition room. Between the large columns and high ceilings, the opportunities (in terms of scale anyway) seemed endless. I left feeling excited to start a new project and to have a killer space in which to exhibit it.

Our next assignment was called "Team Design". We were tasked with developing a framework in which our team would function- a Mission and a set of Visions, Values, and Goals that we would hope to achieve.We talked this over preliminarily before leaving class for fall break (after Friday, of course).

Wednesday 10/13 (48 Days Left)

So Wednesday came around and we got down to business, as soon as I explained my semi-mysterious absence and slightly cryptic conversation with Simon. Tuesday had brought about a few changes in our design: we decided to abandon the rod in favor of gears for realizing the rotation of the visor, we were going to use the wires themselves to pull the car along the track, and we had decided that the Arduino would go along the track with the visor module itself.

Construction came with varied success. We assembled the visor and cross-shaped shading piece without issue, and connected it to the gears that would allow it to fold upwards and down. We wrestled with the track, because the screw pieces that we used to connect the top and bottom of the track were accidentally cut to slightly different lengths and because we had trouble securing the track on these screw pieces. We got them together eventually, and here are some pictures:



We then set to actuating the motors so that we could move the visor module along the track. Simon thought it best to attach the wire to the servo itself down the wire from the electrical connection to avoid putting tension on the connection itself. This proved difficult and we ran into trouble with winding the wires around the servos when one pulled the visor module towards it. Looking back, the wires as the physical connection between the module and the servos may not have been the best idea. We had planned on using fishing wire and DC motors, but as neither worked we had to change strategies. While the wires solution wasn't great, Chris managed to perform successful servo surgery on our two larger servos, allowing them to have a rotational radius of greater than 180 degrees. This, for me, was our group's (meaning Chris in this instance) most impressive accomplishment of the evening/morning. However, even this wizardry was unable to salvage our project, as it ultimately failed.

I remember being really mad that we were unable to make this project functional. I knew that we had worked particularly hard on this one, and the fact that all the other projects were functional only made it more aggravating that ours wasn't.

Monday-Tuesday 10/11-12 (52-1 days left)

I was unable to meet Monday, so I missed any meetings the group had- I once again figured it'd be better to miss a Monday meeting than a Wednesday, so I switched shifts.

Tuesday we were set to meet at 8, so I left central at 7:30. I was crossing the street from the Union to the UMMA bus stop and in a flurry of excitement over the progress I was about to make on this project, I forgot to look both ways and was struck by a moving car. I was and am fine, but I did go to the hospital and missed the meeting. This set me back a bit as my next post will attest.

Sunday 10/10 (53 days left)

We met in the courtyard of the AAB on Sunday morning to plan our next week. We saw this Preying Mantis:

We talked about the mechanical issues that we'd had and tried to address all of them. This included using a servo to move a rod that would push an angled piece attached to the visor to accomplish the full radius of motion that we desired. Another key modification we made was to place the photoresistors in a square on the visor itself. Between each of these would be a cross-shaped piece of acrylic, which would shade the photoresistor(s) that were on the side furthest from the sun. This would allow us to know in which direction the visor would need to rotate, and from there we would be able to actuate that motion. We also tried to improve the design of the "car" on which the visor ran, and attempted to solve the issue of the unsightly wires. Here are some sketches we made:

They're fairly messy but we slogged through them and emerged confident in our ability to make this a functional and marketable product by Thursday.

Wednesday-Thursday 10/6-7 (55-4 Days Left)

So after a night of sketching we came up with the following design: 

- a track (that would go in the roof of the car and which we would suspend from a Merkur stand) along which the visor would run with the use of stepper motors we bought online.

- a visor with an Arduino and a servo which, through the use of gears, would actuate the upward and downward rotation of the visor from its folded and stored position to its utile, sun blocking position. Here's a picture:

- a two-level photoresistor array which would allow the device to sense the horizontal angle of incident rays, and which would tilt upwards and downwards to sense the vertical angle of the sun. This would be set on the roof of the car and would tell the visor where to be and in which direction it need be angled. Here's a picture:

Chris thought of this mechanism before class ended last week.

We started Wednesday with lasercutting. This included the pieces for the track, the visor itself, and the necessary gears and spacers. This went along with a slight impediment, and we were soon assembling the track, the visor (which we painted our characteristic red). The problem we ran into was a fairly substantial one, as we accidentally used the wrong thickness for one of the sheets. This meant we had to use more (hand-cut) layers of the 1/8'' acrylic, which didn't look quite as nice as we meant them to, but as a 1-week surface we were slightly less worried about appearance. The visor was coming along nicely, and we had been working on making the gears fit together, and all the while Chris was doing his magic with the Arduino.

The following were the problems we ran into and how we fixed them (or attempted to):

- We encountered too much friction between the track and the module, and luckily happened to have some Crisco (courtesy of Simon). This was a very successful fix, albeit an aesthetically regressive and somewhat messy one. 

- The stepper motors, which we were going to place on either end of the track, did not work with the Arduino. The h-bridges we had (the h-bridges are the devices which allow the current to and from the motor to flow in multiple directions) did not work with the motor, so we had to abandon those in favor of the motors that came with our Arduino kits. These were largely successful, but we were unable to tie the fishing line to the "car" that held the visor in such a way that allowed for horizontal motion. 

We were able to actuate a small radius of motion with the visor's upward and downward folding by the end of the night, but that was as successful as we were able to be.

Our goals for next week were as follows:
- Replace servo, DC motors with stronger counterparts
- Acquire and install hinges with freer motion
- Interface photoresistor array with other Arduino components

Our presentation was met with mixed reviews- everyone recognized the conceptual development we had put into the project, but not everyone was entirely supportive of the concept itself. There was a faction of the class that thought it was a logical next step in making cars smarter to the needs of the driver, while others found that it would be intrusive and distracting from one's ability to concentrate on the road.

The professors met with Chris, Simon, and Betsy after lunch to review our progress and discuss what they wanted from us in the following week while the rest of us were oriented to the fibers studio. The main criticism we perceived from the professors was a lack of design: they found the presence of wires, among other things, to be aesthetically displeasing. We were excited at the prospect of finishing what we had started with our awesome concept so we chose to revamp it and make it work.

Tuesday 10/5 (58 days left)

So we met as a whole group today to plan out our new project- I was really excited about the direction that Pat, Betsy, Diana and Chris came up with. Their idea was to create a smart car visor that detects the location of the sun and moves/angles itself according to that location so as to block it from the driver's eyes. We'll be a little but under the gun to get everything working by Thursday, but hopefully our enthusiasm will sustain us.

Monday 10/4 (59 days left)

Today the group met as a team to discuss directions in which to take our new assignment- a biomimetic 2-axis solar tracker. I, unfortunately, got my Wednesday shift covered at work in favor of one on Monday in anticipation of a late night constructing a model of our prototype, whatever it would end up being. I have done a preliminary consultation of the Biomimicry Taxonomy, and while my ideas likely don't go far beyond the norm of solar trackers/cell apparati, but hopefully our next group meeting will foster some discussion.

Wednesday-Thursday 9/29-30 (62-3 Days Left)

Wednesday was very nearly a disaster. While it did not produce what we set out to, our finished product was considerably better than it appeared it would be on Wednesday afternoon.

This is how we hoped everything would look at the end of the night.

Chris and Betsy had taken care of the cut sheets and were set to take them to the laser cutter early in the afternoon, but some unfortunate errors prevented us from getting the acrylic pieces we wanted on time: some of the measurements made in the making of the file for the cut sheet were off by a tiny bit, and then the cutter was mistakenly set to a paper setting. By the time I arrived on the scene after completing the hour of work that I couldn't get covered by a coworker, we had all the pieces and were ready to spray paint and assemble them.

Assembly of the surface itself was painstaking albeit simple work- it consisted of screwing hinges to pieces of acrylic- Betsy, Diana and I accomplished it while Chris slaved over the arduino code for the heat, moisture, and light sensors. Once we had finished the assembly, we were tasked with fitting the second base to the apparatus, and then affixing strings and elastics with which we would actuate the folding and unfolding. Once we had everything in place and the servos were hooked up and ready, we finished the assembly.

Triangular panels, the unit cell of our surface.

Our near-completed model.

  

As soon as we had all of the components in place, we ran a simple program that sent the signals to open and close six of the triangular folds (one hexagon and one third of the surface that we assembled). We soon found that neither the servos nor the strings connecting them to the panels were strong enough to accomplish our goal. We decided, as a quick fix, to attach cylindrical screw extenders to the center of each central panel so as to get more vertical force through the string and to facilitate the closing of the pyramids. This helped, but after a few opening and closing cycles the grooves on the inside of the screw extender wore the string we used to the point that it broke. This was about 4:30 am and we had no means of fixing it, being that we didn't have any fishing line or anything, and we then decided to call it an evening.

Class the next day went surprisingly well. I expected to be reprimanded, shall we say, for presenting a dysfunctional model two weeks in a row, but our designs went over fairly well. Pat's renderings of the surface at various stages of open- or closedness helped a lot to communicate our conception of the surface. The discussion in class centered on the utility of such a surface; there was a lot of conversation about whether it was purely spectacle or it effectively served a purpose. The design certainly played heavily on the whimsical aspect of it, and there were admittedly some drawbacks to the installation of this surface. This was definitely an improvement over the relative disappointment of the previous week's model, but we have to improve.