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
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