More photos

Improb Circuitry

A Newly Finished Drive Axle

Entering Aggressive negotiations with SIMON-

SIMON's backside

SIMON at critique

SIMON about an hour before critique- lots and lots of pieces

Reflections on Failure

It's taken me a week to distance myself enough from Smartsurfaces to write this entry without a strong desire to rant and curse more than usual. Despite my perhaps sullen appearance during last Friday's critique, I want to emphasize that I'm not as pissed off as I appeared; I'm disappointed.

I want this post to be as unambiguous and truthful as possible. We Failed. There is no getting around it, and anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. John has been saying all semester "the product is learning" and this was thrown around on friday as justification that our team succeeded. It is not. I learned a great deal this semester but I dont think it was necessary to burn through three-thousand dollars to produce a non-functioning thing, then argue that because we did just that in the process of learning, we succeeded. Our failure was one of wasted opportunity to see the realization of our concept.

Why did we fail? Were we over-ambitious? Did we spend too much time investing in concept instead of execution? Did systemic incompatibilities between members doom us from the get-go? Perhaps and perhaps not; I don't know for certain, Mr Phillips' surveys might clarify this in the future. From my perspective in the final days of the course, our group suffered most from incompatible investment. For Damien and Z, this is their senior design project, for Marc it was a pass-fail course.

Differences in Investment were most apparent in the hours group members were contributing to the project. Some members simply went home early, claiming they did not work past a certain arbitrary hour. Other's stayed all night to complete the task they had set themselves. Personally, I begged for extensions twice so I could focus on SmartSurfaces, and write my Russian papers on the weekends.

Towards the end of the week, this was becoming a blatant source of friction, making cooperation between members more difficult. Between technical glitches and lack of sleep, our group was suffering significant setbacks, coupled with the persistence of ambivalence we seemed to be burning at both ends.

The day of critique was pretty awful. We had succeeded in created the structure, but none of the "smart" elements were there. It was a big blow to our group morale to see zero synergy between the elements that had taken so long to construct, and the electronic brains of it all. After spending all night fussing with the new margaret board, Damien and I were adamant about it working. We wrote a quick bit of code to turn on the LED's, trying to breath some bit of life into SIMON's shell. It was a futile attempt-

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I had hoped that when this project was complete, we would all have something to brag about, "I made that". Unfortunately, this is not the case. I feel fairly accomplished in having tackled some major problems and designing solutions despite the fact that they were not visible or employed during critique. Having invested so much time into this course, and given the rather disappointing outcome, I think some unapologetic bragging about what I contributed and learned in the process of attempting the final project is in order.

The Motor System:

Yeah, this was a pain in the neck. However, The challange was really rewarding. Damien and I worked together to create initial designs and worked through the entire process together. We produced drawings, 3d models, several prototypes, technical drawings and finally a functioning drive system. I am especially proud of being told the week of crit that our drive system would never work by a mechanical engineer at toyota, and proving other wise.

It Works- up your's Toyota!

Margaret Board aka Ghetto Peggy Board

I think for being put together the night before, this was a pretty impressive circuit. Not to mention we used only what we could forage, while the peggy board cost over $200, and for our use both served the same function-

CNC Galore!

Perhaps it functions to underscore the complexity of what we were attempting to do, but I am pretty proud of our group for making use of just about every bit of manufacturing technology we had at our disposal. The laser cutters were used to produce numerous gear mechanisms and drive system prototypes. I designed parts for both the 3-axis mill and the circuit board printer at A&D, and with the help of Rachel and Damien probably logged about 20 to 30 hours of production and tooling time on the mill. Marc Operated the WaterJet and Router in the FabLab to cut out our steel gears and SIMON's polycarbonate skin.

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What I'm taking away from this course

• Trust is a two way door. It is not enough for part of a group to simply trust the other and expect work to be shared or even complete. Trust has to be established by the behaviors of group members, not simply added to the mix to solve underlying problems. Reciprocation is not a given in group work: you can get burned-
• Being more sensitive to other's ideas fosters group dynamic. Working in smaller groups or one-on-one with Damien for example, helped me to appreciate alternative approaches. In large group's it feels like everyone is vying to be the clearest voice, or you sink to the background. By being less insensitive during our large group meetings things went smoother and the sense of combativeness faded.
• Breaking down communication barriers between disciplines by finding a shared language. Again, I think this was illustrated most clearly by working with Damien and our use of Illustrator to communicate our ideas. Using visual language to communicate was much more effective than 'talking it out'.
• Simultaneously, while some of my most pessimistic notions of group-work have been confirmed, I feel much better prepared for future group-work in knowing what behaviors to avoid and which to pursue.

What was brought to the table for Critique

Simon

Simon is a heliotropic, feel-good machine. He interacts with a user through motion and LED color mixing and enters a default solar-tracking mode when not in use. Face recognition technology, a simple joint system, and a flexible LED array make possible a wide range of movement and interaction while photovoltaic panels provide the power. By fusing emotional connections with the user, we hope to transform the concept of sustainability from a condition of sacrifice to that of pleasure.

Team Softcore
Rachel Boswell - School of Art and Designn
Eric Harman - School of Art and Design
Marc Maxey - Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Lindsey May - Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Damien Stonick - Material Science and Engineering
Zilin Wang - Material Science and Engineering

Why I didnt sleep last week

The week began with Damien and I spending countless hours custom cutting gears and welding them into place. The process was excrutiatingly slow but the results were well worth with. SIMON(our smartsurface) now had a fixed mechanical structure that provided rigidity to the hinged planes, it could now stand up without flopping over like a dead fish. Damien also learned how to use the mig welder.

Damien's Practice welds

Negotiating with SIMON

Perfection!

Rachel and Z were pretty excited when we brought SIMON to Design Lab 1 in the early morning hours. Afterwords, we went to McDonalds to get breakfast and celebrate- Did you know they start serving breakfast at 3 am? Us neither-

The Next major roadblock came with the Peggy LED board. Whole days were arranged around working to assemble this board, the LED's and ethernet cable required over 4000 solder connection! The first attempts at testing Peggy were pretty disappointing to say the least; only a quater of the LEDS turned on. Multiple hours were then spent on testing all of the solder connections to the board and Z noticed that the IC chips were in backwards! As a group, we decided that enough time and energy had already been invested into the peggy board to warrant overnighting new chips to ressurect our lighting system. The Chips arrived early thursday and we were dealt yet another blow; only half the LED's were now working, and only just. The LED's flickered and fizzled, there had to be a short somewhere-

With hours to go, our options were becoming slim. Luckily Z had picked up some adhesive backed copper foil I mentioned to him earlier. With only a piece of acrylic and come copper foil, we (Damien, Rachel, Z, and myself) decided to scrap Peggy and build a new circuit. The result shown below was to laydown strips of copper on the acrylic for a makeshift circuit. The circuit used 4 TIP-120 transistors to control the circuits ground connections at 4 points, one for every color of LED we were using. The transistors allowed us to use the PWM signal from the Arduino to perform color mixing, and effectively replace the Peggy board. The whole process was fairly quick, with Damien stripping the ethernet from the Peggy board, Rachel then testing each salvaged pixel, then handing it back to Damien for positioning while I soldered the wires in place.

R.I.P. former Peggy Board

Creating our alternative board, I think we dubbed it "Margaret"

Completed Circuit with the few LED connections: TESTED AND FUNCTIONING

Here's to hoping Margaret wouldnt be a treacherous black-hole of time and energy like her predecessor-

Drive system: Success at last!

There's always time for...

...a good rant.

In response to an article here, which discusses the completion of the Yas Hotel in Abu Dhabi, two things come to mind:

1. Whoa thats really beautiful and they did that with LED's! Even Cooler!

2. That's a lot of LED's, I bet they were expensive. What else does it do? (nothing-)... huh, kind of a waste.

This hotel is ridiculous and I think it really bastardizes "Green" technology. So I suppose if this were my hotel and I had this absurd facade that I wanted to illuminate at night, then yes LED's are better than incandescent bulbs. However placing this extraordinary display on a hotel that is literally built around the burning of hydrocarbons (It is surrounded by a formula racing track-) is pretty disgusting.

You know what would be really great? Instead of blowing millions of dollars on this silly facade just 'cause you can, then surrounding it in pavement (cement being one of the most energy-saturated materials available), consider installing low-flow faucets. Maybe using ultra efficient washing machines to launder linens, saving thousands of gallons of water, would be a worthwhile thought for a city that lies in an extremely arid climate-

As the article points out, this application of technology is yet another example of excess without reason. Worse, if this were to become a trend with a technology such as LED's, it risks establishing a high-end market niche for industry as well as cultural connotations of luxury. Transforming a technology that may one day replace incandescent and florescent bulbs as commonplace to a gaudy signifier of the ignorant 21st century bourgeoisie.

Doomed Drive System

After brainstorming with Prof. Marshall and Zack for a while, we developed a strategy for salvaging as many components of the drive system as possible to keep water-jetting time for recuts at a minimum. Examining the all the dimensions and looking over the aluminum frame led us to believe that an error was not made in the dimensions of the components, but the frame and piano hinges were the source of our gear meshing issues.

The Group members that fabricated the frame are in no way to be blamed. They did the best that they could with the tools that they had access too. Unfortunately, the method of construction led to irregularities, albeit small, that compounded to make the alignment of CNC gears impossible.

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A New Plan

The alignment of the axle and small gears within the frame is accurate as far as I can tell, so we're re-cutting the large gears, and customizing (grinding) each one to be placed in the center of rotation. It's excrutiatingly slow, but it will will be the best way to verify that the gears are meshing correctly-

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Pieces of the Old Plan

Aluminum Rod For Motor Coupling

Final coupling after lathe work and tapping for set-screws

Assembled Motor Mounts (CNC'ed Delrin, Aluminum Motor Coupling)

with the filed and cleaned gears and support plates

A single complete Drive Unit

Installed Drive Units

GUH-

I HATE GEARS!

I have double and triple checked the dimensions and placement of our components within the frame, and everything is looking good... except the gears are not meshing properly.

It's nearly 6 am, I've been trouble shooting since before 2, and have yet to identify the source of our problem-

Drive System: Delrin Motor Mounts & Axle Supports

Hopefully the last night of milling! Rachel and I worked to mill out the delrin support structures for the drive system starting at 7 and ending at 3 am; another 8 hours logged on the roland mill-

Jigs for holding stock material

Cutting

Motor Mount

2 Axle Components: Axle Support & Endstop

Super-thin layer to keep parts secure during machining

Drive System Bits and Pieces

Tomorrow we will be water-jetting the first components of the drive system! Below are all the gears and reinforcing brackets to protect the aluminum frame from self-inflicted damage-

37489... 3749... 3750!

Yes, thats right, We have 3750 solder connections to make... and this is just for the LED's. We still have the wiring for the drive system, solar panels, CMUCAM, and a lovely assortment of microcontrollers to go-

This whole situation lead me to ask, "Why isnt there a coffee pot in Design Lab 1"?

Perhaps the algae team wouldnt mind lending us a few of their IV bags? Then team four could be on a steady drip of caffeine!

Damien, Rachel, and myself stayed after our group meeting to do a bit more soldering and made some decent headway. We managed about 50 complete pixel circuits with ethernet wires attached.

A Complete Pixel Circuit (front)

A Complete Pixel Circuit (back)

Tonight's Results

...and lots left to do