Mec Review

Looking back on sprint one and moving forward on sprint two
Sprint One
During sprint one we worked on laser cutting a frame to suspend the hanging balls before we pivoted. We also started working individually on the design where rather than moving up and down the nodes would open and close to show different movements. We thought that making the nodes open and close would fit better with our design goals of growing our mechanical skills as moving the balls up and down wasn’t as difficult as we had originally anticipated. At the end of sprint one we had a lot of sketched ideas for a new node design and katya had fabricated an awesome opening and closing mechanism based on the design of an umbrella.
PIVOT!
Start of Sprint Two
We pivoted and changed our mechanical design from a grid of balls on strings moving independently to opening and closing nodes that are mounted on a wall and react the the environment around them. On the mechanical team we spent time playing with different folding techniques to create the coolest opening and closing node and tested one out using the laser cutter. Our goal is to have a proof of concept halfway through the sprint and our MVP buy our sprint review!

- Maggie

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where Mechanical At

Sprint 2 ended on Friday and we have our MVP! What that means for mechanical is that we have a box that can move nine different nodes, but control 3 sets independently, using three actuators. We made our prototype with some scrap .21" hardwood with the laser cutters. We converted the rotational motion of the sliders into linear motion with a pin and rack design, with the rack mounted on a slider with ball bearings to reduce the friction. The three gears were connected with a rod so that as one gear rotates the rest rotate as well. Our challenge coincided with retaining the gears with the bearings linearly, since the gear shaft would often tilt down (it was not a perfect press fit. We ended capping both sides of the shaft to retain it, but due to a misprint, the final design was switched, so the cap was not as effective as it should have been. The biggest issues with this design is that there was a lot of friction in the gears, and the system was too constrained, which made rotatin...
Read more

Mid Sprint 4!

The final sprint has come to pass and demo day is just around the corner! The mechanical team has worked hard to get the entire mechanical system up and running and the software/electrical team is currently working toe get the system flawlessly integrated with the web app and integrating the sound detection code into the system. We are really excited about the final demo day and we think we are in good shape for getting all of our ducks in a row in time. Stay tuned!
Read more
Image
Today Peter and I worked on reading and interpreting audio signals using pyaudio. We made use of functions from Allen Downey's ThinkDSP book to help us extract frequencies and magnitudes for .wav files. We were able to graph the distribution of the frequencies and their magnitudes and were able to see a difference when we recorded a sound with a low frequency and one with a higher frequency. Our next steps are going to involve figuring out how we can extract useful information (frequency with highest magnitude) as our code is running. We might also try to use threading so that we can be recording and interpreting sound data at the same time.  - Vicky
Read more