The Final Product: The iWall

Well, it's over, and it's been fun, so I guess it is time to do a quick rundown of what our SmartSurface was. The nice part is, I produced the blurb for our group, so I can kick off with that!

The iWall Modular Light-Filtration System

The wall you see here is a modular, scalable, self-adjusting multi-aperture window, designed to optimize light flow into a room by manipulating the position of rotating wood panels. You could call it an 'automatic venetian blind', as that is the gist of the purpose. The system consists of 30 individual modules, with one panel per module, which allow a variable amount of light to pass through. The structural elements are built modularly, but circuitry elements - such as wiring - are set up in a non-modular fashion. Individual module apertures open and close in reaction to the intensity of the light that passes through the wall as detected by light-dependent resistors (LDRs), seen on the projection side, holding a relatively constant light level on the ‘interior’ of the wall at all times - this gives 'heliotropic' and 'smart' characteristics to the wall - 'surface', fitting it into the premise of the SmartSurfaces course. The actual actuation is by a grid of servos powered externally and controlled through inputs from an Arduino Mega and the LDRs. The materials used in the assembly of the individual modules were 3/16" cast acrylic cut by laser and 3/16" 6061 aluminum sheet cut by water jet.

The design for the iWall was described in a previous post, so here I will mostly detail the construction. Fortunately, Pete was kind enough to provide us with a large number of photos taken while we were assembling the system in order to do just that!

I will not cover the electronics, as you can likely check out Neil's blog for the information on those. Suffice it to say, they worked, if not necessarily perfectly - no fault of Neil's, it was just 'quantum weirdness', as John put it.

First, our final product:

A Module Rendered:

Module rendering, with panel rotation shown.

Exploded to Show Pieces:

Fairly simple, each module only has 13 pieces:

8 Acrylic Rectangles

4 Aluminum triangles

1 Servo for operation

Step 1: Produce Module Pieces

All acrylic is laser cut.

All aluminum is cut with the water jet.

Step 2: Lineup

All of the pieces lined up pre-assembly.

Step 3: Assembly

Connect aluminum to acrylic cross-bars. Tight fit!

Put sides on triangles and glue sides together.

Took a little brute force, the fit wasn't exact.

Place in rack, attach third side to each half.

After this step, panel is placed in center and two halves are glued together, producing a full module. The glue had to set for several hours before it was structurally ready.

Step 4: Build a Wall

The modules simply bolt together, and wiring is laced down the sides. The setup process for the wall built from individual modules was a couple of hours, which was impressive but not altogether surprising. We did expect something to go wrong, but nothing really did until everything was built and wired - there was a circuitry issue (see Quantum Weirdness in introduction).

Step 5: Complete!

The reason the iWall worked so well was the attention to detail put into perfecting the design of each of the individual pieces, and into optimizing the production process of the modules. From final design to gallery piece was about three weeks, which shows how quickly our group could work once we had a concrete idea to unite around. Everyone put in a ton of hours over the last couple of weeks of the project in order to ensure that we got results, and our wall was a resounding success! It can be seen in the Architecture Gallery in the Taubman School of Art and Architecture for the next few days, and then will be moving somewhere in the Duderstadt Library after that point.

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.