Group Reflection
Project Day 1: We got our groups and assigned roles as our first task. Emmeline is the project manager with Jacquee as the assistant. Willie is the programmer with Emmeline as the assistant. Madison is the builder with Willie as the assistant. Jacquee is the Designer with Madison as the assistant. After we assigned roles we started brainstorming what we should make for our project. We didn’t want to do a gingerbread house because we wanted to test our creative limits a bit more than that. We decided that we wanted to make an ice skating rink because we thought we would be able to incorporate a lot of cool, unique interactive elements. Once we finalized our idea, we drew a sketch of our idea. Project Day 2: Today we made a supply list of everything we needed for our project. We did this by looking up our most essential parts (motor, speaker) and seeing what additional parts are required to make them function correctly. We also made a few assumptions of things we will need just based on having experience using arduinos and creating circuits. Additionally, we put down supplies we need to make our ice rink more aesthetically pleasing and creative. Here is our supply list: Arduino
Project Day 3 Today we took our drawings from paper and recreated them in an illustrator file. We had previously mapped out the dimensions of each piece of gingerbread, which made it really helpful when creating the illustrator file. The house was easy to create because we were able to use the rectangle tool and did not need anything else due to the simplicity of the shack. The next component was the tree, which was very challenging and required a few different methods to get it right. The first issue was the gap, in one side the tree was a proper 3.5 in but the other side accidentally became 4 in when the gap was added in, so that needed to be reworked which was simple once the problem was discovered. Also, in the first attempt at creating the tree the two models did not have the same measurements so they would not have fit together. This problem was resolved by simply taking away the extra half inch used for the gap and making the gap by taking away a quarter inch on both sides. Then, on the second tree part the gap was also half an inch so they would fit. Also, it was hard to make the branches look like a tree, but we were able to use the line segment tool to get them even. Another issue was angles and trying to make the trees look as symmetrical as possible, which originally was not possible by just looking but that issue might have been because of the different line lengths. Once we got the lines right the angels fell into place. To make the trees we had to use the line segment tool and just make the lines symmetrical. Finally, the skater girls were made with the pen tool, once one was made the design was copied and pasted for a second, and the head was made with a circle tool which we cut in half. We also were able to make our speaker play jingle bells by finding the right arduino code. At first, the songs we were playing from the speaker were obscure Christmas songs like “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Ding Dong Merrily on High”, and they were almost unrecognizable, so we used a different code to play Jingle Bells. The song was much too slow at first so we sped up the tempo but adjusting the line of code that says tempo, and changed it to 150 to make it go faster. Project Day 4: Today we used the laser cutter to cut into the cardboard to make our prototypes. The gingerbread house turned out perfectly. All the dimensions worked and the pieces fit together well. When we went to put together the tree, we realized that the slit where the two tree pieces connect was too wide for the cardboard. We were ready to make the gap smaller when we realized that the gingerbread would be a different thickness from the cardboard. We checked to see how thick the gingerbread was and it’s approximately a half an inch thick, which is the same thickness as the gap. We decided to increase gap by .2 inches to leave a little wiggle room with the gingerbread. Also, the tree pieces are two different shapes so we decided to delete one of the tree shapes, and just duplicate one of them so they are the same shape. Another problem we had with the laser cutter was that we couldn’t get the two skating girls to print initially. The problem was that illustrator wasn’t reading the shape of the girls as lines so we just highlighted them and indicated in illustrator that they were basic lines. After we did that the laser cutter was able to print them. We also started working on our second interactive piece: the stepper motor to make one of the skating girls spin. When researching what we needed to make the stepper motor function correctly, we thought we needed a ULN2004 that we didn’t have in the lab. However, Ms. Riley found a code that worked with an H-bridge chip that we had in the lab, so we decided to use that code and circuit instead. Project Day 5 Today we worked on making the stepper motor spin! We had to build a fairly complicated circuit, as well as alter some code from online in order to make this work. To make the circuit, we followed along a picture, but for figuring out what part of the code we had to alter, we were on our own. After looking at the code, we realized that the incorrect pin numbers of the chips were being accessed. What I mean is, the original code said that pins 8-13 were being used, when really pins 9-12 were being used. Once we altered that piece of code, the motor still didn’t turn. We decided to rebuild the circuit because we did it quickly the first time and we were confident that there were no errors in the circuitry. After rebuilding the circuit, we plugged the arduino into the computer, uploaded the code, and the motor started spinning! However, there was still one problem. The motor was not making continuous 360 degree turns, it was turning 180 degrees in one direction, and then turning back 180 degrees in the other direction. To fix this we altered the part of the code that controlled the type of rotation, and also sped up the rotation speed a bit. It was so satisfying once we got the stepper motor to work how we wanted it to! Project Day 6 DESIGN REVIEW: So far our progress has been really good. We have figured out how to make the interactive pieces of our skating rink work, and the final steps for the speaker and the the motor is to hook them up to a battery and also make them work with a push button. Our illustrator file is also complete. We fixed the problem with the skating girls and figured out why they wouldn’t print. We also adjusted the gap of where the two pieces of the tree fit together to make it .2 inches bigger so that the gingerbread has some leeway room. The pieces of our house fit together well. What’s left to do with design is to decorate our skating rink. We will need white paint and white glitter, cotton balls, green paint, and brown paint. Also, if we have time, we are thinking of adding an LED to the top of the tree. As a whole, we are in really good shape! Project Day 7 Today we worked on our circuits and worked on implementing a button. We had spent many days trying to make the push button work so that if you pushed on it once the speaker would play the music, however, we were not making much progress and couldn’t figure out how to make it work correctly. We probably redid the circuit for the speaker 5+ times and tried so many different codes for it, we even tried merging two codes, but we weren’t make progress. If this project wasn’t time sensitive, we would have kept going, but because it was due on Friday and we needed to get other things done, we decided to make the push buttons work so that you have to hold it down to make the speaker play music and the skating girl spin on the motor. Because we didn’t want the breadboard to be visible on our project, and the pushbutton was sitting on the breadboard, we had to solder wires to the legs of the push button so that we could hide the breadboard and make the push button visible. Once we did that to two push buttons, we were able to attach them to our speaker circuit and our motor circuit. Today our gingerbread was cut on the laser cutter as well and we spray painted our box and our tree. Cutting the pieces out of the gingerbread was a little tricky. Not all the pieces were fully cut through by the laser cutter so we had to go in with exacto knives and cut the pieces out ourselves. This was difficult because the gingerbread is so fragile and we really did not want to break it! Luckily, we successfully cut them all out. We also spray painted our box white because since we are doing a skating rink we wanted the entire base to either look like ice or snow. Before we spray painted our tree, we had a bit of a disaster. It was standing up-right when a group member picked it up and it broke into pieces. This was so so scary and kind of frustrating because we had spent so much time putting it together!! Luckily the pieces were big enough that they could be assembled back together by glue. But, before we put the pieces back together, we spray painted the tree green! Today was super productive because we were able to divide and conquer. While all that was happening, another group member was putting together our gingerbread house and our tree. We wanted to get the house done so that the next day we would be able to decorate it without it being wet and risking breaking the entire thing We were so happy with how the tree and the house came out and it was really awesome to see our hard work over the past week come to fruition. Project Day 8--After school Our group was really nervous we wouldn’t finish (still had to decorate the tree and the house, and figure out how to hide our arduinos and breadboard while also making the push buttons visible), so we came in after school because we didn’t have class. We focussed on making a hole for the motor to pop out of with the spinning girl and a hole for that push button to pop out of, while hiding the arduino and breadboard. It was hard to get the correct size hole for the motor. At first it wouldn't spin because the motor was touching the edges of the cardboard, so we had to make the hole gradually more and more wide until the motor wasn’t touching the edges at all. After we made the hole the correct size, we hot glued the motor to the bottom of the base. Next we cut a square hole into the base for the push button. Because we wanted the push button to be prominent so people would no to click it, we made it stick out of the hole pretty high, so that the wires were showing. The wires didn’t look very good so we used cotton balls as fake snow to cover the wires and surround the pushbutton. Next we glued one of the skating girls made out of gingerbread to the motor and watched her spin! We also made candy canes out of pipe cleaners that we planned to put in little jumbles all over the board We also decorated our gingerbread house today--i think we went through like 3 tubes of icing, but it was worth it to make our house look good! We also decorated our tree today. We cut strips of ribbon and hot glue gunned it to the tree to make it look like tinsel. We were so happy with our progress today and we're really glad we came in to work on it outside of class or we would not have finished! We knew we would only have half of class on thursday to work on it so all we saved to do that day was glue down the house and hide the speaker and arduino/breadboard. Project Day 9 We decided that the best way to configure our speaker, arduino, and breadboard would be to put it all inside the house and glue the components to the side walls so that they would all fit inside the house. We unhooked the two wires that connect to the button because we had already glued the button down in a particular spot and we wanted more mobility when gluing the house down. Once everything was glued we went back to hook up the button wires to the wires inside the house and while pulling on a wire to connect to the button, it pulled out on the other side. This was super problematic because we had already glued down the house and couldn’t fit our hands inside the gingerbread house to reconnect the wire. We were totally devastated but knew we had to do something because our speaker was perfectly functional and we did not want to give up. We decided it would be best to a square into the base and around the box so that we could pick up the entire house and reconnect the wire. Once we cut the square around the gingerbread house we peeled off the bottom layer of cardboard and reconnected the wire--and tested that the speaker played a noise 5+ times, just in case! To re-assemble the house back to the base, we took an external piece of cardboard, a little bigger than the square of the cut, and glued it on top of the square cut out. Then we put the fixed house down on top of that piece and glued the house down too. The last step was to cover the extra piece of cardboard we placed down, which we did by glueing coconut flakes all around the perimeter. Then, all we had to do was decorate! We used cotton balls as fake snow and surrounded the wires of our pushbuttons with the cotton balls so all you could see was the actual button. We also used coconut to make the border of the ice rink as well as making more clusters of candy cane and a small rock path. We were really happy with the end result! Personal Reflection I had a great time creating the gingerbread project with my group. It was so fun to do something that was inspired by the holiday season! I was the main designer and assistant project manager. My group worked very well together and we always helped each other out when facing a challenge. When I came up with the idea to do a skating rink my group loved it and we started brainstorming how to incorporate interactions into it. I was absent for two classes but thankfully it was easy to just jump right in! I enjoyed putting together the prototype and actual gingerbread house. I received great help from my peers, and when some of the broke we stayed positive and fixed the pieces. We also brought in supplies and used the provided resources to decorate the whole set together, after agreeing to meet after school. I also helped troubleshoot the speaker, somehow a wire became loose when we glued it to the base and after trial and error together we fixed it! After hard work from everyone we successfully implemented a speaker to play jingle bells and a turning gingerbread figure skater with the push of a button! I liked this project a lot, my group worked very well together and I learned more about what my key interests are. I love to organize and design and decorate, while also learning about each component/key part of the project too. Although I didn't spend much time coding in this project it definitely sparked my interest!
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