Kaushik Murali and Gladstone Butler

10/23/17

 

What is your big idea, in a sentence or two? How does it address the museum context?

  • We want to have 3 electric drums and a fountain in a tank right behind it. Each drum corresponds to a single nozzle which ejects water when the drums are struck at fast enough speeds.

If you apply why-how laddering, can you identify an essential underlying question? What is the simplest abstraction of your idea?

    • Fundamentally, our project is a fun activity with a reward incentive. Both of those concepts are fairly simple to begin with, and we have a straight-forward way to accomplish our goal.

Who is the audience? This might include user, viewers, or passive bystanders. What is the experience of the audience? What might they remember?

    • We want this project to attract children from the ages of 6-8 years. The idea behind the project is to see how different type of input interactions (drums) can lead to different outputs in the fountain. The relationship is simple enough that it can hold the interest of younger children, while the variations possible in input can attract older children.

What will your proof-of-concept entail? Can you sketch it? Can you sketch the engineering elements (circuits, mechanical drawings)? Good drawings at this stage are invaluable, they can identify many potential problems much more efficiently than fabrication.

  • It will consist of two main parts. The first part would be the drums, which will be on a table but the surface will be at a slight angle. This allows for the drums on the further end of the table to be hit head on, improving the signal from the input. The next component right behind it will be a transparent tank with 3 nozzles in it, corresponding to the 3 drums in the set. The wiring will be done under the table and will be well hidden and safe from water damage.

How do you propose to divide the tasks among the team? What roles will you each undertake and for which parts?

    • The nature of the construction in this project allows us to build the drums and fountain together. The drums by themselves are a simple assembly task so we need to focus more on the construction of the tank and fountain. Stone has more experience with music and thus, will be working more with controlling and manipulating the event based signals to the Arduino while Kaushik will work with the synchronization of the nozzles with the signals.

What features do you specifically propose to ignore? E.g., a project involving a wearable device could focus on sensing and actuation but choose to ignore battery operation in favor of a wired supply. In general, we’d prefer you keep your workload under control by emphasizing interesting behavior or interactivity over fit and finish.

    • In this case, we choose to ignore the detection of physical input on the drums, opting instead for software that converts physical intensity on the drum into an event based signal. We are also not using water from a pipe for the fountain, opting to recycle water from the tank the fountain will reside in.

What features do you specifically propose to test? How will we know if it worked?

    • We intend on testing two features. The first thing to test is the signal from the drums to the Arduino. To test this, we can use either lights or sound that should blink or make a sound when a specific drum is hit. It will be easier to use sound as the speaker can emit a louder sound when the drum is hit harder. The next step is to test the speed of ejection for the nozzles in the fountain. Once the we have tested the signal, we need to ensure that the force at which the water is pumped through the nozzle is of the right amount to ensure the water reaches the right height and at the right time. This can be visually tested once the drums and tank are set up.

What qualitative or quantitative metrics can we apply to gauge the success of the prototype?

    • For a quantitative metric, we can look at the time lapse between hitting the drum and the output. More importantly, the combination of different drums should correspond in the right manner without too much of a time lapse. The biggest gauge of success for us would be how long we can hold the interest of the children that interact with our project. Ideally the children interact with the project past their point of curiosity and more because of their interest in it.

What supplies will we need?

      – 1 pressurized pump: $10

                  – 3 nozzles: $15

                   – 3 solenoid valves: $15

                   – 3 force sensors: $20

 

Sketches:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B-Zy9oeEXbOwOUhJeUE3b2d6LW8?usp=sharing