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.