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 30, 2010
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.
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. :)
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. :)
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