Tuesday, October 26, 2010

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.

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