The Final Product: Minor Heliotropic Surface

The grand finale for our last minor project took place on Friday. Our project, as mentioned earlier, was a binary heliotropic surface based on the mechanism of a Hoberman Sphere. The idea was that one side would open and the other would close based on the presence or lack of light.

The biggest problem that we had with the project crept up in the final 24 hours. The final problem was two-fold. First, the motor shield was assembled improperly. It was an honest mistake, two of the resistors on it were switched (one is a high resistance for handling current to the Arduino, the other is lower resistance for handling current somewhere else). My Arduino wound up fried because of this. Secondly, we did not have a motor capable of operating the system. The slip present in all of the stepper motors we had available made it impossible to get enough torque to close the system, even though very little was actually required. Fortunately, John had a fix for us, by providing us with a significantly larger stepper motor and a working motor shield.

With new equipment in hand, we were able to finalize our project just before class began. We tested it a few times, and had an issue with the line we were using not spooling properly - not something that could be fixed in a short period of time with no resources available for it. We had to make the best we could of it. Fortunately, when it came to our time to present, the code worked well, and the system opened and closed as intended. Mechanical stress caused the fracture of a couple of pieces during the testing, but the issue was minor and due to the material properties - ideally, the system would not be built out of acrylic.

Julian Bleecker had some criticism for our project in the sense that we delved too deeply into the mechanism, and should have stepped away from it. I couldn't disagree more. In fact, I feel that the reason our project was a good project was that we spent so much time working on the mechanism. Instead of creating a one-trick pony - something that would have a single intended use - we developed a mechanism that could be utilized in a large number of situations with some modification and scaling. Developing with an intended use is overrated, in my mind, as a lot of things developed with an intended use do not stay in that category for very long. Perfect the mechanism, and let other people figure out a use for it. There'll always be someone that is interested enough to find a way. XKCD states it pretty well. If you build it, they will come.