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!
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