babysitting the plants

So gutting the bulbs might have been my favorite part of this project so far.

It involves a lot of broken glass/coaxing/brute force. One bulb broke in my hand because I squeezed it too hard (I had gloves on! and it was old). Another bulb got a hole punched through it due to an unwieldy blow with a screwdriver... you get the point. but I LOVED it.

anyway, Cabrina and Julie were away this weekend so it was my turn to baby sit our plants...

...which translates to instagram photoshoots. SO. CUTE.

looks like model IRL

Yay!

While I built our looks like model out of legos (so we could figure out good dimensions for the actual solidworks piece), Julie & Cabrina tried to fix the bug in our turning program with the added weights.

Here's a picture of me making it.

looks like model sketch

solidworks side (x2)

**updated GEAR support shelf (x1)

motor/motherboard shelf

testing, testing, testing

programming.

The first thing that we had to program was to turn the motor, and thus the pulley, and thus the lightbulb-terrarium 180 degrees. This is our first shot at it, without really controlling the speed, other than having it proportional to keep it from wobbling back and forth once it completed the turn. We'll go back in a bit to work to change the speed, because as is, it'll probably be too fast of a turn which will cause the terrarium itself to spin and possibly get tangled and maybe hit each other and all sorts of undesirable stuff. But after testing a bunch of gains...

Now, to integrate these movement subprograms into the main light sensing program.

Choosing an arbitrary value for "direct sunlight" (values < 20), we programmed the motor to turn away. Once it turns away, it wait until the sensor on the opaque side of the bulb is no longer experiencing "direct sunlight". The wait is in there because once it begins to turn away and goes into the 'then' subloop, sensor 3 will begin picking up that it isn't in direct sunlight, because the bulb has JUST begun to turn, so of course it isn't experiencing direct sunlight yet. A wait for the amount of time it takes for the bulb to turn keeps this from happening.

- the final project -

our redone works like model

after presenting our works like model, Lynn suggested that we change our pulley system (that we tested on day 2) into a gear system...

This

instead of this:

 The gear system was actually a really great idea (I wouldn't expect less from Lynn I suppose.) While the pulleys did work pretty well, they did tend to get misaligned a bit (there was a lot of torque and friction/not enough friction and all of that nasty unideal stuff). With gears, although there was still a bit of the torquing problem, the gears turned altogether pretty nicely. Although we did get the solidworks files done before we realized that we wanted to make the turning mechanism out of gears rather than pulleys, it turns out that the large gears (x3) were the same size as our three pulleys, thus we only had to add two more holes for the smaller gears... thanks Lego, for being pretty consistent!

blogging is hard

I'm going to implement a slight change of format for the final project documentation... here's a little preview

more to come soon...