Monday, October 25, 2010

Sketching on a TI84

Apparently more than one person has hooked up their graphing calculator to their Arduino...this video is pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMNOGHKQDQk

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Learning Organically

This is what we did on Thursday:
Got on the little orange bus

Went to the Botanical Gardens
There we learned about all the ways that plants kill things, reproduce, and use energy efficiently.  I had never been so interested in a green house before.  I wish we could have taped each explanation of the plants and their mechanisms for world domination.  Here are some of the plants I thought were the most exciting:

Orchids






I was inspired by the way they are pollinated. They direct the bees where to go and
basically make them passively do all the work. It is a two-step process that is very
inefficient, but using sticky surfaces the plants may eventually be pollinated. I think
it would be neat to make an interactive smart surface that was so smart it could make
people act the way it wanted them to. Oh, and they're pretty, too.

Killer Plants

The two pictures above are from two different plants that get nutrients from insects by trapping them.  The bugs get stuck and then just sit and rot until they are broken down enough for the plant to use them for nutrients.  The simplicity and passiveness of this system could be used as inspiration, though for our purposes we probably wouldn't want rotting insects.

Window Plants!

Also known as living rocks, the window plants that inspired the team to use fiber optics in Project 2 were in the green house!  The chlorophyll is actually in a small layer along the edges of the plants and the window on top allows the sun to be penetrating in at all times of the day to reach the chlorophyll.  The plants are also camouflaged as rocks so that predators won't find them.  Maybe our prototype could have a bio-inspired camouflage and have an unrelated purpose...our act biomimetic and look like something inorganic.


Thursday, October 21, 2010

Please Quantify...

We got together this week to define our team and structure.  We seemed to agree on strengths, weaknesses, and our mission but I got stuck on goal writing.  I sometimes wonder why I chose to go in to engineering in the first place (typically at about 2AM when I am still at the library) and talking about our team and project goals reiterated for me that I require numbers with my goals.  I need a way to test a hypotheses or answer a yes or no question to feel comfortable...this may not always be necessary (as my team is still trying to convince me), but it really makes me feel better.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

It's Alive!

High five!  The LFST is alive!!  After reconsidering our design for last week we came up with a slimmed down, less tank-like version.  What we seem to have made instead is a little alien creature with some interesting personality traits...here is a video from about 11:30 PM last Wednesday of our little guy:




This was the first time I had ever made something that seemed to be an entity all by itself once it was plugged into an electrical source.  It was really exciting and kind of changed the way I feel about design and creation.  Instead of trying to make a very specific thing with the exact attributes that you want you can make something and then let it tell you what you have made...Karl basically said the same thing during some of the presentations and I wouldn't have really believed it until this project was done.  This also hits on my weaknesses thus far in Smart Surfaces.

I always want to have a plan that we can all stick to and follow because I thought it would make things more efficient.  Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, but maybe being super-efficient isn't always better.  Letting something that follow the basic criteria grow organically was really rewarding and the level of excitement after our solar tracker started moving was amazing.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Defined by Being Confined

I don't know if other groups feel the same way, but it seems like this task is really draining to ours.  We are supposed to make an item that will track the sun, indicate when it has located the sun, and involves biomimicry.  It is supposed to rotate on at least 2 axes and should have personality.  I thought being unconfined was hard for the last design, but having a forced operation is proving to be more difficult.  It seems even worse because I feel like we have to fudge a way to put biomimcry in the design.  I guess we get to define the function of our design, but when it has to involve tracking light it limits the functions that would make sense to use.
 There are a lot of interesting creatures that use light in peculiar ways such as the window plant that uses crystals to guide light down from its flat top down to its roots.  This led us to think about using fiber optics, but they proved to be too expensive and difficult to obtain for our project...not sure where we are going to go with our project at this point.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Bringin Home the Tomatoes

The beginning of last week was a little frightening for me...we had two seemingly different approaches to our urban farming problem.  One faction wanted to stick with the geometrical polyhedron and the other wanted to come up with a completely different shape and different mechanisms for the final prototype.  To jog your memory this is the prototype from the week before:

The main problem that I had with this design was that it was inefficient in doing its most important functions....like collecting water.  It was supposed to collect water in those flaps on the bottom and squish the water into a sponge or through a membrane.  Another problem that was discovered was that when this prototype is scaled up to size it would stick out 6 feet.  That kind of defeats the purpose when we are trying to save space.  There was some resistance to change in the group but we eventually came up with a compromise.

The original design that was suggested was the following:


It really isn't that attractive, so much of the group wasn't very fond of it.  It also doesn't quite follow the original criteria of shapes that cover curves efficiently, so a compromise was made:


The top side of each of the panels opened out to allow for water to come in easily and can allow for venting heat and humidity.  Here is a pic of the final product:



The code used for Arduino is as follows:

//  SmartSurfaces 2010
//  Project 1
//  Design Group 1
// 
//  Alex Carmichael, Jason Prasad, Beth Glesner
//  Joyce Tseng, Jim Christian, Chris Parker
// 
//  Written by Beth Glesner and Chris Parker
//  Using SHT1x Library by practicalarduino.com

#include <Stepper.h>
#include <SHT1x.h>

#define SHTDATA  2
#define SHTCLOCK 3
SHT1x sht1x(SHTDATA, SHTCLOCK);

#define MOTORSTEPS 400
Stepper stepper(MOTORSTEPS, 8, 9, 10, 11);

float instantTemp  = 0;
float averageTemp  = 0;
float instantHum   = 0;
float averageHum   = 0;

int cpuCycles      = 0;

void setup()
{
    stepper.setSpeed(100);
   
    Serial.begin(9600);
    Serial.println(“Starting Up”);
    Serial.println(“Calibrating Sensors”);
   
    for(int i = 0; i < 30; i++) {
        averageTemp  += sht1x.readTemperatureF();
        averageHum   += sht1x.readHumidity();
        delay(1000);
    }
    averageTemp /= 30;
    averageHum /= 30;
   
    Serial.println(“Sensors Ready”);
    Serial.print(“Average Temperature(F): “);
    Serial.print(averageTemp, DEC);
    Serial.print(“  “);
    Serial.print(“Average Humidity %: “);
    Serial.print(averageHum, DEC);
    Serial.print(“\n”);
}

void loop()
{
    instantTemp = sht1x.readTemperatureF();
    instantHum = sht1x.readHumidity();
    Serial.print(“Temperature(F): “);
    Serial.print(instantTemp, DEC);
    Serial.print(“  “);
    Serial.print(“Humidity %: “);
    Serial.print(instantHum, DEC);
    Serial.print(“\n”);
   
    if(instantTemp > averageTemp + 2.0) {
        Serial.println(“Opening Panels”);
        stepper.step(400);
    }
   
    if(instantTemp < averageTemp - 2.0) {
        Serial.println(“Closing Panels”);
        stepper.step(-400);
    }
   
    delay(50);
}

This code averages the temperature and humidity in the room and then opens or closes the panels when the temp or humidity differ from the average.

These are the roles for the week:  Rhino-Jason, Jim, and Alex  Arduino-Chris and me  Presentation-Joyce  Construction-everyone!  


I was really impressed how well we came together as a group in the end.  We started out on shaky ground this week, but pulled together to come up with an impressive final product.