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.