[Mon Apr 23] Final Project Second Thought

Before class, Oscar, Essie and I had a discussion about how to divide our work so Essie and I can work more efficiently and I can contribute more to our project. Oscar explained that we should first finalize our concept. Then we should think about what are the many things that we need to do. We should write them down and assign each task to one person so two people are constantly working on different parts of the project. We need to communicate with each other all the time so if one task takes longer or shorter than we expected, we need to reassign the tasks so that both of us have things to work on all the time instead of one person having to wait until the other one finishes. Integration is a very important process because things can go wrong and we might need to go back and revise pieces of our design.

With that in mind, we went back to our dice design. Essie and I were a little skeptical about it since last class because we were not sure how the gravity thing is going to work. I wanted to think more about it before we gave up but it did seem to have many issues, such as it would have to be very durable since it will be tossed around. I was also having a hard time convincing myself that the inside circuit is going to work because given our work from last class, it was hard to jam in wires going to different direction in a small space. The wires tend to touch each other and create a mess.

Therefore we decided to think about more options and eventually we thought we could do a theme park. We could make two boards perpendicular to each other. The one on the bottom will be the "ground" while the other one will be the background wall. It is going to have a merry-go-round, ferris wheel and a few human figures on the ground and fireworks in the background wall. We would have some LEDs on the ferris wheel that can be turned on and off and bi-LEDs on the top of the merry-go-round and as fireworks. We will also integrate motors into our design so the ferris wheel and the merry-go-round could spin. Our interaction will be turn the switch on and off for the motors and LEDs and we were going to integrate the potentiometer into our circuit so we can also change the speed of the motors and the brightness of the LEDs.

We tested out all the LEDs and circuit designs that we think we might run into and had a problem about the potentiometer. It can change the brightness of the lights okay, but at a particular point, it would suddenly become very bright. In other words, the brightness does not change evenly. Same problem with the motor. We waited for a long time before we could talk to Oscar but he didn't like the idea... because it was not interactive enough...

But he did help us to rethink about our dice idea. I told him that I was worried that putting a mass in the middle of the dice would make it hard to place the batteries. He said we could use the batteries themselves as the mass. Then I was worried that it is not going to be heavy enough or the connections might be bad. He said that we could somehow make the battery have a negative end at one side and have several positive ends coming out of the batteries to be connected to the LEDs. Therefore we don't need to use push buttons; we just need to make sure the wires connect well when the dice lands. We thought that would be hard but it could work. Essie and I also decided that we need to connect the bottom of the dice to the top so that when it lands on the bottom, the light on top would light up.

We left with a general idea that the dice is going to have a smaller box inside with the battery.