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.
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