Documentation of the Process

List of sketchbook entries:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Problems we encountered:

Problems: The project was supposed to have a few parts that didn't end up being implemented, mainly because of time constraints. These include a sensor to turn on the hot plate, a screen to display information and animations and speakers to explain what was going on.

 

There were also problems with the componenets we did manage to create. First of all, we had thought of building our gears in Maya, which proved to be doable, but difficult to do precisely, and we cannot be certain that such gears would even have functioned. Eventually, we used VectorWorks in the maquette lab.

 

We also had difficulty figureing out how to hook up a DC motor to the circuit in such a way that it turned in both directions. Eventually, we figured out how to use an H-Bridge and everything worked properly.

 

There were also problems with the weather-acquisition aspect of the program, but a large part of the problem was the limited documentation of the scripts we tried to use and the stability of servers we were using.

One other particularly annoying problem was with the delays in the program. The way the delays were set up, never seemed to function quite how we expected, so it took a lot of rewriting, something which was particularly annoying, because the DC motor couldn't be easily reset to a particular position.

The majority of our problems were in the wiring of the circuit though. It just took a lot of trial and error, but eventually we got the machine to work pretty much as planned.