I really should be spending this time soldering bits of wire together, but I'm taking this time instead to update whoever reads this on what in the world we've been up to this month. I will give a brief summary of each week leading up to now, give a detailed description of our final project and where we currently are, and conclude with a summary of what I know still has to be done.
Oct. 28: We showed our plan of what wanted to do - a wall of moving panels - as well as the inspiration behind that. At that point, the motion was created by solenoids moving each panel up and down. We had a small Merkur-set gadget with two stacked solenoids that moved one panel in a set of five up and down in response to different sensors. We also had LEDs on the side of the gadget that lit up in response to some of the sensors. We decided that solenoids seemed too weak and we would need far too many of them, so we started researching different mechanisms of movement.
Nov. 4: This time, our gadget consisted of several rods of shiny spinning panels, powered by gears and servos. Pat showed a rendering of what we want the wall to look like eventually. Dan and Betsy showed the different natural-looking tessellation patterns they had found and cut for possible panel shapes.
Nov. 11: I can't tell much from personal experience, since most of the work was done Wednesday night and I got horribly sick then and had to skip class the next day to recover. But, the rest of the group created a large (~7ft tall by 4ft wide) module with several strips of chipboard panels, spray painted silver and hot-glued to a metal rod. The framework was constructed from stiff strips of metal, but was a little wobbly due to lack of accurate measurements for the corner braces. The strips of panels were spun at the top by stepper motors controlled by Arduinos. I haven't watched the video for that class yet, but apparently their presentation went quite well, and Max thought we were going in a great direction when I talked to him the next day.
Nov. 18: We experimented with different methods of stringing the piles together to see which material gave us the best effect. We wanted a cascading effect. After trying fishing wire, cable, and different methods of attaching ribbon, we decided that ribbon strung through the tiles gave us the best effect. It didn't seem like much progress from last week to me, as I knew we had to really get on this stuff, but I felt like I couldn't say much after not being involved at all the previous week. We also figured out that we wanted to vacuum form the plastic tiles. After we figured that out, and realized how much time that took up, there was a sudden realization of how screwed we potentially were. During class, Simon went out to the site and saw the installation place...which was completely different from what we requested, so I'm not even sure if our opinion even mattered.
During the following weeks, much of the group spent time routing the woodboard needed for the vacuum forming, vacuum forming the plastic tiles, cutting out the tiles, poking holes for the ribbon, and building the gigantic framework. I soldered a row of circuits for the motors somewhere in that madness, but most of the work was done over Thanksgiving weekend, and unfortunately I had a family trip planned since the beginning of the semester from Wednesday afternoon until Sunday afternoon, so I couldn't do much. As soon as I got back, though, I rushed to the Architecture building and started washing tiles off (that was what I was told to do). We've been working around the clock ever since I got back, it seems.
Our final project has a giant 12ft wide by 9ft tall metal framework, with 33 strings of 14 tiles spaced equally along the strings and along the framework. Each string is connected to a stepper motor via a metal strip, which spins the string of tiles as directed by Arduinos. The Arduinos spin the tiles according to sensory information from 17 PIR motion sensors along the bottom of the framework.
I still have to solder several wires, and we still have to test everything, and we have to assemble our thing onsite, which will have to happen tomorrow. We still have the rest of tonight and much of tomorrow for circuit-building and assembly of parts that can be assembled offsite. I'm not sure how many circuits we have left to build, but most of the stuff has been for motors so far and I don't know where Chris is going to put the motion sensors in all of this. I suppose I'll just start soldering stuff and trust that he knows what he's doing.
