Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Less than 2 days left...

I really should be spending this time soldering bits of wire together, but I'm taking this time instead to update whoever reads this on what in the world we've been up to this month. I will give a brief summary of each week leading up to now, give a detailed description of our final project and where we currently are, and conclude with a summary of what I know still has to be done.

Oct. 28: We showed our plan of what wanted to do - a wall of moving panels - as well as the inspiration behind that. At that point, the motion was created by solenoids moving each panel up and down. We had a small Merkur-set gadget with two stacked solenoids that moved one panel in a set of five up and down in response to different sensors. We also had LEDs on the side of the gadget that lit up in response to some of the sensors. We decided that solenoids seemed too weak and we would need far too many of them, so we started researching different mechanisms of movement.

Nov. 4: This time, our gadget consisted of several rods of shiny spinning panels, powered by gears and servos. Pat showed a rendering of what we want the wall to look like eventually. Dan and Betsy showed the different natural-looking tessellation patterns they had found and cut for possible panel shapes.

Nov. 11: I can't tell much from personal experience, since most of the work was done Wednesday night and I got horribly sick then and had to skip class the next day to recover. But, the rest of the group created a large (~7ft tall by 4ft wide) module with several strips of chipboard panels, spray painted silver and hot-glued to a metal rod. The framework was constructed from stiff strips of metal, but was a little wobbly due to lack of accurate measurements for the corner braces. The strips of panels were spun at the top by stepper motors controlled by Arduinos. I haven't watched the video for that class yet, but apparently their presentation went quite well, and Max thought we were going in a great direction when I talked to him the next day.

Nov. 18: We experimented with different methods of stringing the piles together to see which material gave us the best effect. We wanted a cascading effect. After trying fishing wire, cable, and different methods of attaching ribbon, we decided that ribbon strung through the tiles gave us the best effect. It didn't seem like much progress from last week to me, as I knew we had to really get on this stuff, but I felt like I couldn't say much after not being involved at all the previous week. We also figured out that we wanted to vacuum form the plastic tiles. After we figured that out, and realized how much time that took up, there was a sudden realization of how screwed we potentially were. During class, Simon went out to the site and saw the installation place...which was completely different from what we requested, so I'm not even sure if our opinion even mattered.

During the following weeks, much of the group spent time routing the woodboard needed for the vacuum forming, vacuum forming the plastic tiles, cutting out the tiles, poking holes for the ribbon, and building the gigantic framework. I soldered a row of circuits for the motors somewhere in that madness, but most of the work was done over Thanksgiving weekend, and unfortunately I had a family trip planned since the beginning of the semester from Wednesday afternoon until Sunday afternoon, so I couldn't do much. As soon as I got back, though, I rushed to the Architecture building and started washing tiles off (that was what I was told to do). We've been working around the clock ever since I got back, it seems.

Our final project has a giant 12ft wide by 9ft tall metal framework, with 33 strings of 14 tiles spaced equally along the strings and along the framework. Each string is connected to a stepper motor via a metal strip, which spins the string of tiles as directed by Arduinos. The Arduinos spin the tiles according to sensory information from 17 PIR motion sensors along the bottom of the framework.

I still have to solder several wires, and we still have to test everything, and we have to assemble our thing onsite, which will have to happen tomorrow. We still have the rest of tonight and much of tomorrow for circuit-building and assembly of parts that can be assembled offsite. I'm not sure how many circuits we have left to build, but most of the stuff has been for motors so far and I don't know where Chris is going to put the motion sensors in all of this. I suppose I'll just start soldering stuff and trust that he knows what he's doing.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Thoughts on the current presentation format

At the start of every class, we present our projects. An order is chosen, and the first group presents their stuff, which takes maybe 5-20 minutes. Then the floor is opened up for questions.

The questions, I think, are supposed to be from the students as well as the professors. However, I've noticed a trend. Once the professors start critiquing the group, they continue on for quite some time, bouncing off each other. If students have questions or points while the profs are talking, the hands sometimes go unnoticed, and the points are forgotten or given up if the student is not extremely patient and/or assertive.

Also, it is difficult to stay focused on any one thing for quite some time. We have, as of right now, used 3 hours, half, of the class time today for presentations and critiques. I'm not saying that's a waste of time. I'm saying that I can usually keep alert through one presentation, but I start zoning out during the long critiques if there isn't a quick bouncing around of questions and ideas from several people. But several presentations, all in a row? Goodness, we're all zombies by the end of it. We need a break, maybe multiple breaks.

Ah, well. Food time.

Progress and Exciting Advancements in Documentation

Well it is nearly 3am and all that is left to do is the coding of the Arduino gadget monster thing. Since Chris is basically nocturnal, and is also the Arduino god of our group, we're just going to leave that to him. He's currently chatting with someone in another group who just got some radio Arduino communication thing to work.

I have exciting news from the land of documentation - although I have yet to start a continuous Google Doc or any sort of archive of emails (outside my inbox) or uploading stuff periodically to the CTools page, I did create a couple of pages in order to promote group uploading and publishing our work to the outside world. If you want to follow our group specifically, the links are below.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/55236033@N08/ (no uploads yet since I have to grab them from facebook since those have a much smaller file size)

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ducktrap2 (3 videos so far)

Also I have to say thanks to Prof. Max Shtein who is letting me use his camera for the semester. Most of the pictures were/will be taken from my own camera, but some pictures were/will be taken on the Shtein Cam, such as when my batteries die or when it's just more convenient. Videos were/will be taken exclusively on the Shtein Cam since that camera is far better at videos than my older model. Both are slightly beat-up Canon point-and-shoot digital cameras. Mine is an older model with more settings and zoom, but the file sizes of anything are humongous. The Shtein Cam appears to be a newer model will fewer functions but much better video and possibly smaller file sizes.

The only thing I have to finish for tomorrow is the budget and the presentation. We probably should've decided to meet early tomorrow so we could go over the presentation. oh well...I'll just upload everything to CTools and send out a notification.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Tuesday Oct. 26 - 37 days left

We currently have the entire team gathered in DL1. It seems like no one has actually gotten their things to work in the time being - well, Chris has the temperature and humidity sensors working, but Pat and Betsy are having trouble finding the right code for their devices, and Dan's still trying to get the Arduino software to work on his Mac.

Chris had an idea for the tile wall where we'd have different "resolutions" by using different shapes. If we used triangles and hexagons like the first project, we could do "low resolution" actions with the hexagons and "high resolution" actions with the triangles. Theoretically we could have two types of motion going on, one level with the hexagons (sets of 6 triangles moving together) and then another level on top of that with the triangles moving individually.

He also had another idea inspired by our 489 group's chat with Max Shtein earlier today. Shtein brought up some windows that have groves in the glass/acrylic that allow light to travel along the straight grooves when there's an LED at the start of the groove. Chris had the idea of having curvy grooves so the light would travel in curves.

For Thursday, we need an operational prototype and a $500 budget. We're thinking that we want to make a simple interactive surface for this week - maybe a couple of chipboard panels and some sensors, and have the panels (attached with actuators) move different ways according to different stimuli. Maybe we could stick some LEDs on there too, and make them go off when the other sensors do something.

Now we are looking for a tessellation/tile pattern found in nature that is interesting and would appeal to someone's sense of wonder.

Looks like we're breaking up for the evening soon. The goal is to get everything working by the time we meet tomorrow. Chris, Dan, and Simon will get together to work on code at 6pm tomorrow. Betsy and Pat will work on finding a good pattern for our final project and getting some renderings of it.

First Thoughts on the Final Project

Goodness, I haven't updated this thing in forever - sometimes I wonder why Shtein wanted me in particular to be the Documentation Queen. I mean, I love organizing, I love taking pictures, but I'm not entirely sure I'm responsible enough and disciplined enough to handle this.

Two weeks ago we got the assignment to design our teams and figure out how we would work for the rest of the semester. That went pretty well, I thought. I'm not sure how it's helped us so far, but we also haven't worked much on the project yet. We also got a tour of the old Pfizer building, now the North Campus Research Complex (NCRC), where we'll set up our projects at the end of the 6 weeks. I kept having a weird sense of deja vu from when my AP Chem class toured it when it was still Pfizer back in high school, but it was cool seeing all the places where we might put our thing. The problem was, we really had no idea what we were doing then, so we didn't really know what to look for. At the end of class we got together in our groups and figured out a $200 budget, which at this point just consisted of different Arduino gadgets we could play with. Most of the gadgets we ordered were sensors, but we also got a data logger and some actuators.

Last Thursday we got the assignment of what we were actually supposed to build, which was about as vague as any of the assignments we've received for this class - build a biomimetic smart surface. I guess we knew that was what we were doing from the start, but it seemed like people were looking for an actual assignment before they could start thinking about it. After lunch we took a tour of the Botanical Gardens, where we got a close-up look of a lot of very cool plants and learned about different ways plants work - different forms of biomimicry we might be able to use in our project.

On Sunday we met up for a short time to distribute the Arduino gadgets and brainstorm ideas. We decided that we would work on getting the gadgets working and see what we could do with them, then meet again Tuesday night. We came up with the idea of a double layer of moving tiles that would shift to interact with people and let light in in different patterns (the wall of tiles would be up against one of the glass walls, so natural light will be coming in). That's where we left off...now I'll start a new entry for what happens tonight.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

A Better sort of Sun Visor

Thursday, Sept. 30, about two weeks from now, we were given a new assignment: Build a 2-week surface with 2 axes of motion that can track light, align with light, and indicate when it's aligned. For this Thursday, today, we have to have an operational surface that meets those goals, a presentation featuring screenshots from Digital Project (a not-very-intuitive computer modeling program), and documented biomimetic strategies as potential solutions to the challenge.

Last Monday, we had a brainstorming session where we tried to think of a good application for a solar tracking device. After several strange ideas such as a window with gas inside that changes color to block out sun, a giant ant-burning laser thing, and an alarm clock that attacks you to wake you up, I raised the issue of the sun visors in cars not being sufficient to block the blinding sun at certain times of the day. The other people that were there (Pat, Chris, and Betsy) all agreed that that was actually a pretty good idea, or at least more viable than attacking alarm clocks and windows full of gas.

Last Tuesday, we met at The Desk - a collection of four work tables near Pat's desk in the architecture studio to brainstorm mechanisms and structure of this device. After trying to draw out and visualize the inside of a car, Simon brought his car around to the back of the Architecture building and we all spent a good amount of time chilling in it, looking at how the current car visor design worked, discussing what our device would have to accomplish, and sharing stories. After we seemed to know what we were doing, we headed back to the desk and started to sketch stuff out.

Last Wednesday afternoon, Simon sent out a text saying he and Pat were rethinking the design, but later, when we met that evening, nothing had changed. We built a kind of ugly frame that our visor ran along, with a motor on either end to pull it. Once again, we ran into the problem of motors being too weak and so they couldn't really pull the visor-car along the track.

When the professors saw everyone's projects last Thursday, Karl was surprised that we didn't all have working solar detector things, since he thought that was all they asked for. Maybe they should've made that more clear after interrogating every group about context and application each week for the previous assignment, because the result was that everyone had an application but their projects only kind of worked at best. While about half our group was in the sewing workshop, including me, the profs gave my group feedback. Apparently the general gist of it was to make things more "elegant". It's just so confusing and frustrating when for 3 weeks they say "WHAT'S THE CONTEXT? YOU NEED CONTEXT!" and then we give them context and application and everything and then they're like "what? context? we just wanted a pretty solar tracker!"

So we met in DL1 for a while and figured out how to make it more elegant (enclose the track, hide the wires, round the edges on the visor, make the track prettier) and how to eliminate the strings in the mechanism, since we just don't seem to have great luck with strings and fishing line and it's an ugly solution anyway (we now have a toothed gear pushing and pulling a pole which pushes and pulls the visor to adjust the angle).

Now, once again, we're meeting on a Wednesday night with a ton left to do still. We have a better-looking track which we are apparently going to hang from the ceiling - not sure how we'll manage that. Chris bought stepper motors and smaller servos since John's gigantic servos won't fit on our little track. Chris has the Arduino program ready to go, we just have to assemble the car (the piece that runs along the track) with the Arduino and everything on top of it and solder whatever needs to be soldered. I mean, yes, we're further along tonight than we have been previous nights, but Pat isn't going to get here until 7:30 and I think he wanted to recut everything again. I'm not sure why, when our "prototype" track seems perfectly fine, but as long as we eventually get everything assembled and working I think it'll be fine.

Now more people are here. Back to work!

Thursday, September 30, 2010

HOT GLUE!!!

I'm currently too tired to update you start to finish on what we've done. Once again, most of our group is collected in the Architecture studio stringing strings through holes. I worry because it is very similar to the method we used before, and that method didn't work too well. The others seem pretty confident though.

The surface looks a lot better, more professional. It is all done in acrylic now, and spray painted, with hinges...so many little hinges with so many little nuts and bolts...of course if this was ever mass-produced robot arms would likely screw everything in precisely but it's very tedious to do it by hand. We've also solved the problem of the flaps not closing by using strips of elastic to hold the flaps flat. We've been using hot glue and super glue to attach a lot of stuff to save on time (vs. sewing or other methods).

Okay we just ran into a problem - the elastic holds the flaps too tightly and so we need a lot of force to pull the flaps closed.

Also - we haven't even connected the servos yet. All of the individual pieces work by themselves - the surface looks cool and does what we want it to do, the Arduino program works when it's not actually tied into the system, but we can't seem to figure out the right mechanics to get the Arduino program to move the flaps the way we want them to move.

A note on context - we are thinking of a roof of an outside pavilion now, like the farmers market shelter, that moves depending on activity and depending on weather. With no people, the flaps would form pyramids. With people, if it was raining or snowing, the flaps would form a flat roof. With people, if it was sunny, the tilt of the flaps would depend on the time of day - mostly shielding at noon but mostly open at earlier or later times. Chris has rigged up an awesome light and temperature and motion sensing program. We tried to get a humidity sensor in there as well, but Chris couldn't get it to work with the program. The temperature and humidity readings seemed really off - extreme negative values.

Okay - sorry I keep coming back to this after long periods of working on the project - we now have the strings all threaded through and we have to figure out how to do the "drive string" and how to make the servos work.

arrgh...the strings broke.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Team Duck Trap's Epic Custom Cube


The strange solar Hexa-Prism tiles have evolved into a more shelter-like form. Now we are thinking of making a room entirely surrounded by these tiles, which could open flat or close into pyramids as directed. They might be mirrors, directing light into or out of the room. I'm not sure what they would orient to, though.

Right now, at this very moment, we are putting together a (hopefully) fully functional prototype for the one-week progress report later today. In another week we have to have a fully functional prototype surface, automated with Arduino. I created a model of a room - more like a cube - made of walls of fully open, half-open, and fully closed tiles in Rhino. I had a lot of fun doing this, even though I had to keep undoing mistakes. It was my first time using Rhino, so I kind of learned on the fly, but in no time I was copying, pasting, and rotating complex shapes like a pro...okay maybe not so much like a pro since every other rotate I had to go back and redo since it went the wrong way, but I felt pretty accomplished when I was done. It looks like a spiky cube of doom at the moment, but it's pretty cool.

Chris came up with an idea to use a network of strings pulled by the motor to make the pyramids close. Later that plan was altered slightly to use the helicopter-looking servo motor instead because that provides more torque, whereas the motor didn't have enough torque to pull much of anything. Betsy laser-cut the sheets of chipboard (for the surface) and acrylic (for the frame and pulleys). Simon and I strung thread through the holes in the triangles to make them close up into pyramids. Pat's working on gluing strips of thin acrylic or possibly plexiglass (the architecture students use the two terms interchangeably but I think they're two different things) to the triangles to make them snap open when the tension in the string is released. Chris is working on the Arduino a bunch and soldering stuff. He seems to be our Arduino expert at the moment. Simon and Pat are creating a model of the flat surface in Rhino with the same pattern that I used to make a cube. I'll post some pictures that I took of the screen right here, but they're going to send us images later that might look better.

Pictures!






Oh, and I should explain our name: We decided to call ourselves Team Duck Trap (and our email group is ducktrap2) after last week's duck picture incident. Here is the picture that caused the trouble in the first place:



I had no idea one goofy picture would have so much influence.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Week 2 - New Materials, New Challenges

Yesterday in class we had a guest speaker, Eugene Shteyn, who taught us a new brainstorming technique. First, he went over some general brainstorming rules:

Come up with as many ideas as possible. No criticizing or evaluating allowed during the brainstorming. Quantity is better than quality - don't worry about coming up with a good idea, just get all your ideas out there, even if they sound stupid. Wild ideas are great, since it's easier to tame something down than it is to make something more complex. Build and improve on each other's ideas. No action items should be generated just from the brainstorming session. Don't think about any value judgements, think only of solving the problem first.

He also presented some interesting findings about brainstorming and working in groups, such as:
- People perform better individually, but working individually is more frustrating than working in a group
- the best way to work is in pairs - less social intimidation, but people can still bounce ideas off another person who may have a different way of thinking
- electronic brainstorming, like posting ideas online, takes away most of the social intimidation people feel from talking face to face, so it often generates more ideas than in-person brainstorm sessions
- groups of people work better together on simple tasks, but worse on complex tasks

Then, he told us about reverse brainstorming. Instead of coming up with solutions, the idea of reverse brainstorming was to come up with problems. This takes some pressure off, since it's often difficult to think of solutions, and people might be scared that their solution won't work, or it's stupid, or too complicated, etc. But everyone can think of stuff that's wrong with something. This method also helps decrease frustration in the group, as people can state everything that's not working or that they don't like with the project. Also, instead of vague statements like "it sucks" or "it doesn't work", people have to state the problem clearly. This technique allows all group members to see what issues their fellow members are having problems with.

Each team was challenged to come up with 100 problems. They could be problems with the world in general, or more specific problems with our project, or anything in between. At first our team just generated a lot of questions - things that had an answer, but we didn't know it. Prof. Shtein showed us that the problem was that we didn't know the answer. He told us to think more in terms of problem statements, since then our brain isn't fooled into thinking things are truly problems by the question mark at the end. From then on our team generated several problem statements, mostly focusing on problems with our most favored prototype, the Hexa-Prism solar tile things. In total we came up with 91 "problems", but this included some of the more vague "questions" at the beginning to which we had just added "we don't know", as well as some duplicates.

In the second part of the workshop, each team was given a whiteboard with a grid of 100 numbers on it, corresponding to the 100 problems we had generated. Each team member was given 20 sticky notes and told to use the stickies to indicate on the whiteboard their preference to research 10 of the problems short-term (1 semester) and 10 long-term (5 years). This allowed the group to see what problems most people in the group wanted to focus on. In all of the groups, I think, one of the high priorities had something to do with recycling of parts.

I found the workshop to be quite intriguing. I was kind of surprised that there actually were problems that most if not all group members wanted to focus on. One of our major concerns was the load of weight that our design could withstand without any damage. We were originally thinking of that weight as a buildup of snow during the winter, but it could also be leaves, or branches, or even a cat landing on it. Mr. Shteyn admitted that he would not think of snow since he's from California. Remembering this right now, it reminded me of a similar design thought difference present in southeastern New Mexico. Over the summer I interned in Carlsbad, NM, which is on the edge of the Chihauhuan Desert. In that region of the country, they don't get very much rain. In Michigan, there's tons of rain. It's not constantly raining, but there's enough of it that when designing roads and buildings architects and engineers have to think about where all that water is going to go and how it's going to get away in a way that doesn't cause much damage or inconvenience. So we have gutters on buildings and drains on the roads, and we slope things so the rain goes into these containment devices. In Carlsbad, because they're so used to it not raining, they don't have gutters, or drainage systems. The locals joke that Canal St. (the main road going through the city) is called such because it turns into a canal when it rains - and the latter part is pretty close to the truth. And all that is fine, when it's dry. But this summer it rained far more than usual, causing the (presumedly not specially sloped) roof of Wal-Mart to leak all over the store and the roads to flood several times. Canal St. is actually in horrible shape, probably because of a combination of water erosion and traffic, and the people have been trying to get it fixed for years.

Let me try to get back on topic, because I did have a reason for bringing Carlsbad into this. People can be geniuses, but if they don't take the local environment into account when building something, they usually fail. That doesn't make them stupid, it just means they maybe didn't do their research. We have to think about where we're going to install our project, and how we might have to change our design based on location and environment. To take two extremes: If we install it in Houghton, MI (near the top of the UP), effects of snow accumulation should be one of our major focus points, and we don't really need to worry about overheating other than making sure the device doesn't overheat itself. (Houghton rarely gets above 80 degrees F even in summer, but can get around 15 ft of snow in one winter - and the snow sticks around until May.) If we install it in Las Vegas, on the other hand, effects of overheating in direct sunlight should be one of our major focus points, and snow is barely a problem at all (I have a friend from Las Vegas who fried an egg on a sidewalk this summer when the temperature was supposedly around 120 degrees F). All of this is assuming that we stick with a project that will be exposed to the elements, of course. It is possible that we can come up with a design that is resistant to overheating, is strong enough to withstand heavy loads, does not sustain damage with several types of precipitation, and can tolerate wide variations in temperature, which would work in most climates, but we would still have to tweak the design to deal with extremes.

I suppose right now I should really only be worrying about the assignment due in two weeks. We need to create a surface with the same criteria as last week, but for this week, we can use up to 3 sheets of acrylic, and we have to make the surface move on its own with the Arduino. I think we'll probably go with our Hexa-Prism tiles unless those prove too difficult to move, or if we come up with an even better idea. I am pretty worried about all of the parts we want to move smoothly and efficiently, all those triangles that we want to fold up perfectly. We should probably laser-cut the triangles to make them line up better. We'll also have to figure out the framework we want the tiles to be on, and how to make them orient themselves. The framework is the first thing I think we should focus on, because I know there's still some differing opinions in the group. Simon thought we could put them on arms, but Patrick was thinking of having them on tracks. We'll probably discuss it at tomorrow's meeting. We'll also have to figure out whether we want to focus on water collection or sun collection, but I think at the moment we've pretty much ruled out water due to the electronics difficulties.

Oh, and about our prototypes that we presented - The critique actually wasn't that harsh, although I felt silly for putting a picture with a rubber duck in the presentation. The duck was a prize from Explorth, a program designed to let students explore North Campus. Someone - I think Dan - left it up in the Architecture gallery where we were working, so I took some pictures with it. I had meant it to just be a fun title slide, but Mr. Shteyn took it as a serious idea of putting ducks into our project, which we hadn't really thought of. Also, the other groups only presented one prototype which was a culmination of all their improvements, whereas we presented three separate prototypes. Prof. Shtein asked us which one we would pursue, and we said we would probably pursue the latest one, since that kind of came out of the the other two and was our latest improvement on the design. Our design was actually fairly similar to Team 1's design, which used a hexa...penta...some polygon with a large number of repeating units that folded to approximate a sphere. Also, someone asked about wind collection and orienting, and we went through some of our first ideas (rudder-like thing that spins it, fold-out wind turbines) and explained the disadvantages (not enough surface area, not enough height and blade length if we're trying to make it portable). I liked the other teams' ideas, although I'm not sure what Team 3 could apply their storage balls to, and I'm not sure how well Team 4's shelter tiles are going to work in a tile format when each tile currently has to curl up to close (thus exposing what they should be sheltering).

Speaking of tiles, Prof. Daubmann told us that we should look at a way to make our projects into repeating iterations of different panels. So maybe some of our tiles will collect sun, but others will have a different function. Perhaps some will actually be batteries (contain storage cells in the triangles). Maybe others will open up to have sensors that can relay weather information - wind, temperature, pressure, precipitation, etc. We'll see what comes out of the the meeting tomorrow, and what develops in the next week. I hate to sound pessimistic, but I have a feeling we may run into several obstacles along the way that may force us to look in new directions. Then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

The Beginning

Hello! I realize that this is kind of late since it's technically supposed to be a "weekly" blog and here I am writing about the first week in the wee hours of the second Thursday of the semester. If you're already confused, here's a quick summary:

I'm in a crazy but hopefully awesome design course (on top of my crazy senior design course) where we actually get to build stuff. I like actually building things, because for the past 3 years I feel like equations and numbers have been thrown at my head with very little application attached. We're in groups of 6, most of which have 2 Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) students, 2 Art & Design (A&D) students, and 2 Architecture (Arch) students. The class is called SmartSurfaces, and the theme for this year is biomimetics, or biomimicry. If you want more info, go to http://www.smartsurfaces.net. As part of the class, each student is supposed to keep a blog that's updated at least once a week. Personally, because I find it hard to keep thoughts in my head for long, I'll probably try to update more often than that, if that's allowed, just so I have a good recording of what I was thinking about throughout the semester.

The first week was interesting. We were told to build a surface with at least 9 interlocking parts, and we drew random other criteria out of envelopes. Our other criteria were "orients" and "folds allow efficient deployment of modules". For this week, it was to be made out of chipboard and could be moved manually, but next week we'll have to figure out how to make it move using the Arduino. When we were first thinking of ideas, we kept running into the problem of some people were thinking more of a robot rather than a surface. I think this may have been due to the modules and the folding. When I think surface, at least, I don't think of stuff coming out of the surface.

After class we continued to share and review ideas via the discussion forum on our group's CTools site. We also met a few times, but it was difficult getting everyone together all at the same time, and at first there wasn't much continual communication between members. I feel like if not everyone is at a meeting, perhaps something should be posted about what was accomplished, what was discussed, etc., so that group members don't find themselves lost or left behind, so at the next meeting, even if it's a completely different set of people (say, if 3 people met one afternoon but the other 3 weren't free until later in the evening but by then the first 3 people all had to be somewhere else) progress can still be made.

After several good ideas had been brought up and some had been tossed aside, we moved forward in starting to try to build our ideas with chipboard. This caused some ideas to be tossed out. For example, I found a very cool origami-like design where a octagonal paper could be folded into a spiral. Another limitation that the Arch students explained was that since chipboard was thicker and less flexible than paper, the space taken up by folds in the material had to be accounted for when sketching out the cuts for the design on the chipboard.

We tried several different folding techniques, including a bunch with triangles, and it looks like we're going to present 3 tomorrow...er...later today. I also created a PowerPoint presentation just in case we're expected to have that - the description wasn't entirely clear. There's one where these flaps fold out as spiraling rectangles from a central rod, with telescoping legs to tilt it to catch the most sunlight. Another is this pod of triangular prisms that unfolds into a long flat chain of triangles, also possibly to catch sunlight - it would be very portable if we could get it to work. The last is possibly the prettiest - 4 tiles of 6 of the folding triangular prisms, fit together so each tile is a hexagon. Theoretically we could put the tiles on arms to move around so they can all catch sunlight without blocking each other with shadow.

I am kind of nervous as the first prototype isn't entirely assembled yet with...less than 8 hours to go now. The second prototype was also giving us trouble folding up nicely, so we had to tape it to make it stay, which is probably going to give us trouble for the unfolding part. The third prototype is pretty much complete. Now all we have to do is figure out what we're going to say, which apparently we'll figure out when we meet an hour before class. While we finish building. Hmm...seems like we need to get stuff done a bit earlier.

One last thought: I think I may look into making a flickr account for our entire group, so we have a way to easily view and share photos between everyone. I'll ask the group about it, see what other people think. It would be simpler than looking all over facebook at everyone's individual albums, and it would be easier to get the photo you want since CTools doesn't have any way to show images without making you download the file.

The next post will likely detail how all of our ideas were hacked to bits by the class critique after we presented our prototypes. :)