Month: October 2017

Project Description:
Inspired by the movie Mission Impossible, I decided to use a DC Motor and a H-bridge to show a wire action of a miniature character (designed and sculpted by Tatyana Mustakos).

The situation I planned to portray was: The character approaches to a target treasure (white LED), going down from the ceiling. However, the character touches the security laser beam (expressed through an IR break beam) of the room, then triggers the wire to wind the character back, up to the ceiling.  Then, once the IR beams stabilize, the wire will reverse its winding direction, letting the character go down towards the target treasure again. This motion will happen in a loop.

One biggest trouble I had was maintaining the stability of the circuitry for this. While I had to mount all hardware parts to the set box,  I had to make sure each wire wasn’t falling off of each other due to gravity.
Due to these mechanical stability issues, I ended up burning my arduino up while documenting for this project. The wire motion has been moving okay, however, the motion does not perfectly sync with the ir break beam all the time, so the wires end up winding/unwinding more than they need to.

What I’ve learned:
MOTORS and H-BRIDGES ARE QUITE TRICKY (to me, at least). I’ve burnt up so many parts (wires, fans, h-bridges, AND my arduino) and I even shocked my own laptop. I had some mad fun with these happenings.

Google Drive (code/fritz diagram/ Video): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B70fyRiHk85qWEZWOEF6RzZyTFk

*VIDEO*: I will re-upload the video once I get a new arduino (I burnt my arduino while documenting, and I didn’t get to capture any motor movements while the circuitry was perfectly fine)

Read about my process here 🙂

For this project I wanted to tell a story through motion. I have always been fascinated with the idea of zoetropes and how they really were the first moving picture. My final iteration was that I was going to have two buttons that would control the speed of a DC motor powering the zoetrope. The faster you click the buttons (sort of like dancing with them) the faster they would go. I wanted the end experience to be as if you are dancing with them and they are mimicking your speed. However I ran into many an issue that would inturn make me question doing this project the way I did it again. First off, I had a lot of trouble with motors, either they were too fast or two slow and in the code I wanted the speed you clicked the buttons to be able to ramp up or down the motor. Unfortunately these motors would only slow down to 128 making it impossible to achieve my final goal. None the less I have a working zoetrope that starts and stops when you dance with them.

video link (the dancing in the zoetrope doesn’t translate well to video)- https://youtu.be/tVxent6FQnM

code and etc- https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_JEXda9ZXwvWDh3elZyVkRmWVU?usp=sharing

This project was one that really pushed me in the conceptualization phase of the project. The project conceptualization is the field in which I have been pushed the most in this class. I decided to do a scene from a movie that I hold very dear to my heart- the animated Pixar movie Up. The 72 year old balloon salesman who wants to live a life of adventure and floats his house into the sky and away with a young boy who is a stowaway.

It is something like I would dream about in my childhood. It is a symbol of hope.

The house ‘floats’ by the use of a fishline that connects to a motor and a pulley. The clouds are controlled by servo motors.

If I were to do this project again and I had more time, I would try and incorporate more sensors and moving elements into the system. I would like the house to respond to things in its environment rather than it being controlled manually.

The troubles I faced involved wiring the H-Bridge and the motor on the breadboard. I think I would consider using a different bread board the next time and soldering the parts that I can to ensure proper connections.

The goal of this project is to use the motor to tell a story. I made a “hungry dragon”, so my dragon would move faster in response to a stimulation (chasing a cat, food placed in front, etc). Movement is shown through rapid rotation of the CAM systems, creating the undulating motion of the dragon’s body.

 

The stepper motor would turn the dowel with the CAMs, and the speed of the rotation can be varied by a potentiometer. However, there were a few challenges: the motor spins too quickly, the CAMs themselves are too large for the frame made, and decorations could not be completed to satisfaction.

To solve these issues, I can cut smaller CAMs, use off-center CAMs rather than snail or tear CAMs, use longer screws, and make the frame smaller. Some parts of my dragon (or sausage links) have to be stationary to create the undulating motion. To make sure the motion works, I could learn to run a SW animation or do a cardboard prototype. To cut better pieces, I can become more familiarized with bitmaps in lasercutting.

In the future, I also want the stimulation to be more in line with the context (the hungry dragon), rather than having a random potentiometer.

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6vucT1cFrpgYmppRzA1TmhBb1U?usp=sharing

 

This project is a juxtaposition of renewable and unsustainable energy sources. The bulky black forms depict a landscape fueled by oil, but the stark windmill blades create a contrast. The power source is the irony of this piece: at some point in history the windmill’s blades and motion were oil.

The focus of this project was the narrative element, rather than electronics. The schematic and code provided by JET was used for this. The only alteration to the code was the speed. A correct speed for to rotate the propellor smoothly was found at 13/255.