This week, we got a lot down. We made decisions regarding dimensions, materials, functionality, and such. We did a number of drawings, and talked through a lot of the design. Upon meeting with our professors, and Michelle, we made (again) FORWARD progress, which was exciting. We are all very excited at this point, and the positive feedback helped fuel discussion that has taken us in a slightly different direction.
Our desire to work with broken solar cells in attempts to make a statement about using recycled solar cells, has shifted to a new direction. We are now making a statement about the waste produced in solar energy instead of using the broken cells themselves.
This will be interesting.
We got together this weekend to work on assembling one cell and to play with resin and the broken solar cells. We tweaked the leaf design a bit and discussed further material options, etc.
We have lots to get done
Friday, November 13, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
slowly
We are finally headed somewhere... in a direction...a direction that is straight and forward. This is extremely good news.
Last friday, we had a pretty good sense for where we were headed. We had met nearly every day to discuss plans for the project, we made a prototype of our mechanism. We had outlined and discussed how our previous ideas and inspirations had brought us to our present spot, and we had gone through many of the necessary calculations to understand the feasibility of the project we had in mind.
Upon meeting friday morning, we were very pleased to have work time and to finally get to sit and talk with our professors in a small group. This was an incredible change from the usual critiques we get in class, which are helpful, yet leave a lot to be desired (and generally, my group confused). Our short discussion was helpful, yet caused very painful, unpredictable problems we now faced.
Total makeover?
They seemed to like the idea, and offered up some interesting perspectives, yet it changed the minds of some of our members, and really frsterated the group, as a whole, for it is MUCH too late in the game to still be changing our ideas!
A whole lot of decisions needed to be made, and doing this as a group of six proved difficult.
What to keep? What to scrap?
Do we want the same motion? Do we want the same mechanism? Meaning? Do we want it to respond to humans/sun/weather/? Where would we install this piece? What shape do we want the surface? How many solar cells per surface? (When will the solar cells arrive!?), how will we link everything together? Where will the wires go? How big do we want this? How many rows? How many surfaces per servo? Arduino/microprocessor? Material? Layout? Is this enough energy? Will there be extra energy? What will we do with the extra energy?
And this is just SOME of the many unanswered questions we were facing!
Frightening, right?
We thought so.
tonight,
we made some decisions.
solar cells are also working
forward movement
Last friday, we had a pretty good sense for where we were headed. We had met nearly every day to discuss plans for the project, we made a prototype of our mechanism. We had outlined and discussed how our previous ideas and inspirations had brought us to our present spot, and we had gone through many of the necessary calculations to understand the feasibility of the project we had in mind.
Upon meeting friday morning, we were very pleased to have work time and to finally get to sit and talk with our professors in a small group. This was an incredible change from the usual critiques we get in class, which are helpful, yet leave a lot to be desired (and generally, my group confused). Our short discussion was helpful, yet caused very painful, unpredictable problems we now faced.
Total makeover?
They seemed to like the idea, and offered up some interesting perspectives, yet it changed the minds of some of our members, and really frsterated the group, as a whole, for it is MUCH too late in the game to still be changing our ideas!
A whole lot of decisions needed to be made, and doing this as a group of six proved difficult.
What to keep? What to scrap?
Do we want the same motion? Do we want the same mechanism? Meaning? Do we want it to respond to humans/sun/weather/? Where would we install this piece? What shape do we want the surface? How many solar cells per surface? (When will the solar cells arrive!?), how will we link everything together? Where will the wires go? How big do we want this? How many rows? How many surfaces per servo? Arduino/microprocessor? Material? Layout? Is this enough energy? Will there be extra energy? What will we do with the extra energy?
And this is just SOME of the many unanswered questions we were facing!
Frightening, right?
We thought so.
tonight,
we made some decisions.
solar cells are also working
forward movement
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
solar sculptures and inspiration
The above sculpture depicts the movement of the sun in the sky throughout the year, something our group has been very interested in pursuing.
Below we have an example of solar fabric. This is material that has come up over and over in my group, for we find ourselves constantly wanting to incorporate fabric into the design.
Monday, November 2, 2009
blogging
Although blogging is something I enjoy more than many other types of homework, I have unfortunately found that when I am frustrated with how things are going, I completely neglect blogging altogether. This is a problem, for both my grade and for keeping track of our progress, and is definitely something I am working on.
As for the group...and the project, and the progress... Again, hard to talk about without frustration and neglect, but powering through- my group is great. Everyone brings a lot to the table and we have very easy, free flowing conversation. People are motivated and there are moments of excitement and advancement in ideations as we look at books and websites people bring to our meetings. The project, is less than we had originally hoped, and we are definitely less excited about it than we had hoped we would be, BUT we are not dwelling in this.
We continue to meet nearly every net yet have nothing tangible since the small mechanism we had made for Friday's class. Finally, we put together a budget, and the beginning of prototyping is in site.
We have moved away from the inefficiencies of laying the panels on a flat plan, and have opted for something to increase its interaction with human beings as well as the sun. Our plane of moving solar panels has morphed into a 3D surface protruding out from a gallery wall and attracting potentially curious people towards it.
Inspired by the Mimosa plant, which reacts to touch, be continued to brainstorm how to engage a human being via our surface which is powered by the sun.
With today's meeting we have changed the motion of our solar panels to a flipping motion instead of an up and down movement. We have changed the sensor from one sensing voltage to one sensing proximity, and we have completed our budget.
I am still very concerned that our dome is no more efficient than the plane we had in mind.
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