Day 5: Building, building, testing

After the first tests yesterday, today everyone was busy building their prototypes. So most of us spend at least half of our time in the workshop: testing material, cutting, screwing, gluing, and getting the electronics to work.

At the end of the day, every project looked a bit more developped and presentable. Here are some impressions of today:

Though no one was stressed today, I guess tomorrow will be different.

Day 5: Building frames and cases

Today’s work was characterized by a lot of cutting, milling, shaping, etc.

All teams were in the progress of building different kinds of frames or cases to house the technical parts of their projects.

Consequently, the workbenches and drilling machines were in great demand.

Thanks to a Laser-Cutter available on the second floor, workable material wasn’t limited to wood.

The wonderfully pleasant smell pouring out  of the cutter told every visitor of the acrylic glass that was being cut.

First, the students sketched their drafts on paper, discussed different versions and later redesigned them in Adobe Illustrator.

Parts, the Laser-Cutter should cut out had to be set as hairlines (<0,001mm), while thicker lines could be used to imprint the parts with logos and other decorations.

The results looked so professional that more than one team decided to rebuild parts of their (eg. wooden) frames from glass.

Alongside this modelling, the projects’ technical aspects continued to mature and substantial progress was evident by the staggering amount of blinking LEDs, buzzing motors and humming compressors.

Day 5 (and Day 5,5): The prototypes start to take shape

After the first steps of progress (and minor setbacks) on Day 4, we devoted another full day to work on our prototypes. Although the air was still full of optimism and passion for the projects, we all realized that more obstacles lay before us than originally anticipated. The reasons ranged from defective electronic components over high precision mechanics problems to the overheating of electronic boards. Thankfully we managed to overcome all these hurdles with lots of different (and often fancy) solutions: While one group adjusted both the audio frequency detection of their algorithm and their own voice pitches, another group started cutting their own gears out of plexiglass.

But not only the hardware turned out to be difficult — the programs soon developed into something much more sophisticated than usual Arduino Sketches: Additional shields such as a stepper motor shields had to be used and programmed, whereas other groups reached for full-blown Processing programs to combine the computing power of a real laptop with the Arduino’s hardware capabilities. Even methods like interrupt-driven programs were considered as solutions for really tricky programming problems.

As the day came to an end, it became clear that some projects were still facing serious issues. More work was needed to get the prototypes into shape for the presentation on Tuesday and some groups started to doubt that Monday and half of Tuesday would be enough to get to that goal. So Hendrik and Sebastian decided to devote half of their Saturday (and therefore their own free time) to further help those of the groups that needed additional resources. The results did not disappoint: After lots of laser-cutting, hardware tinkering and opera-like sound performances (for fine-tuning the audio frequency detection), all of the projects were much closer to completion than before.

First Results

After two days of developing we get first Results. Step by step each group built the outer hull and the inner electronic circuits.

We learned that it is important to test every small part of the electronic circuits, because you never now, if any transistor is broken, or the circuit doesn’t work as expected.

See a small video of a circuit with two multiplexer controlled by an Arduino, that can switch on and off all rgb channels of 3 light stripes.

After two days of developing you can see first results:

Status Day 5 Team A - Outside

Status Day 5 Team A - Breadboard

Status Day 5, Group B, Floor mat with cables?

Status Day 5 Team C, trying to fit the circuits into the plastic

Status Day 5 Team D - Cat

Status Day 5 Team D - electronic circuit

Status Day 5 Team E - Outside

Status Day 5 Team E - Inner Life

Status Day 5 Team F

Status Day 5 Team F, electronic circuit