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.