I need to list ten sensors on Wellesley College campus. The hard part comes with the rule to avoid simple switches (i.e. light switches, etc.).
10. The photocopier/scanner has a sensor of some sort that senses the darkness of whatever paper its copying.
9. Itouchs and Iphones have some sort of sensor that detects when your finger is pressed against it.
8. There's a door in the science building that if left open for too long will start to make a really annoying sound. Some kind of sensor would be counting once the door is opened.
7. I think this counts, but whatever sensor senses when you swipe your ID to get into a building or check out books at the library.
6. The electric pencil sharpener at the library senses when a pencil is placed inside it to be sharpened.
5. There's some sensor that if you walk out of the library with a sensitized book, the alarm will go off.
4. The electronic stapler at the library will sense when something is below it and will staple. It's more probably to staple your finger this way then using a normal stapler.
3. Smoke Detectors sense when smoke is in the air or when someone's burned their popcorn in the microwave.
2. Cooking thermometers sense heat and how hot something can be. In my dorm, theirs a couple of girls with thermometers that do a little cooking in the kitchen.
1. Lastly, In the gym, the elliptical machines sense when the pedals aren't going fast enough, and then will proceed to pause your workout.
Why do I feel this should have been a easier list to compile. There seems like their should be so many sensors in our world, why was it hard to come up with only ten?
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Day Eleven?: Auto Threshold Sensing
As we get closer to our final projects, some considerations to remember is that the lighting in the classroom is not going to be the same as the ouside, the hallway, or the exhibition room. So if some sensors are operated by the light being a certain amount lower than the 'normal' light number than they may not work in all environments. This challenge addresses this problem.
We needed to develope a set of commands that would be able to tell if a shadow passes over the light sensor and this program must work in different environments without changing the program each time.
We pulled the picoblocks together and got this in the end.
We told the sciborg to look at the light when its immediantly turned on and set that value to n. Then if the sensor increased by one hundred or more, it would beep, because it would sense the shadow.
Our program worked well in the classroom and then it also did well in the hall. When then took the sciborg outside. We turned him on and didn't get the same result when we waved our hand in front of the sensor to create a shadow. It took us a few minutes to realize we hadn't started running the program yet. Once we hit start, it did work and we were so excited that we had completed this challenge pretty much on the first try.
We needed to develope a set of commands that would be able to tell if a shadow passes over the light sensor and this program must work in different environments without changing the program each time.
We pulled the picoblocks together and got this in the end.
We told the sciborg to look at the light when its immediantly turned on and set that value to n. Then if the sensor increased by one hundred or more, it would beep, because it would sense the shadow.
Our program worked well in the classroom and then it also did well in the hall. When then took the sciborg outside. We turned him on and didn't get the same result when we waved our hand in front of the sensor to create a shadow. It took us a few minutes to realize we hadn't started running the program yet. Once we hit start, it did work and we were so excited that we had completed this challenge pretty much on the first try.
Day Scratch: It's Raining It's Pouring
Today we learned about a new program, its called Scratch. Unlike the Pico program and the PicRDS programs, scratch allows for non-physical reactions. Like if a button is pressed, on screen a cat will jump or something. So its a little different from what we've previously messed with. It was oodles of fun figuring out the different possibilities with this program.
This wasn't the only thing we did in class though. We also learned about making our own 'sensors.' We had alligator clips and craft materials and our imaginations. Our sensor was looking for conducticity. We had three different pieces of felt soaked with varying amounts of water. Each piece had a different amount of conductivity. The dry felt being the least conductive, the drenched felt the most conductive, and the third damp felt was a medium conductive.
One clip was tapped to the foil wrapped plate and the other clip was attached to the fuzzy pipe cleaner pen. When the pen is touched to the varying degrees of water soaked felt, it will receive different readings. To make a small illustration of this, we created a program so that we had a cat, that was walking along and over head he had some clouds. If the pen was touching the dry felt, there would be white fluffy clouds. If the pen touched damp felt, the couds turned grey, and if it was the drenched felt, the clouds would be black thunderheads.
Our cat had clouds follow over his head. Below is a picture of our cat in the sun.
This wasn't the only thing we did in class though. We also learned about making our own 'sensors.' We had alligator clips and craft materials and our imaginations. Our sensor was looking for conducticity. We had three different pieces of felt soaked with varying amounts of water. Each piece had a different amount of conductivity. The dry felt being the least conductive, the drenched felt the most conductive, and the third damp felt was a medium conductive.
One clip was tapped to the foil wrapped plate and the other clip was attached to the fuzzy pipe cleaner pen. When the pen is touched to the varying degrees of water soaked felt, it will receive different readings. To make a small illustration of this, we created a program so that we had a cat, that was walking along and over head he had some clouds. If the pen was touching the dry felt, there would be white fluffy clouds. If the pen touched damp felt, the couds turned grey, and if it was the drenched felt, the clouds would be black thunderheads.
Our cat had clouds follow over his head. Below is a picture of our cat in the sun.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Day Nine: Too Fast, Too Heavy: Classroom Drift
K2, our dragster, went under serious remodeling during this class period. He lost one front wheel, a lot of heavy LEGO blocks, a few gears and the weight was placed nearer the ground in the front. All of these modifications were the end results of a few different experiements.
Second Design: Take a few blocks off of the dragster, giving it a triangular shape as one wheel was removed. Elongating the frame, gave a little more space, taking away the necessity of piling the PICO cricket, motor, and weight all next each other really close. Here, spreading out these components helped.
Third Design: The design was moving despite these improvements. We checked the batteries and found that they were dying. Replacing the batteries resulted in a much faster time, by about two seconds.
Four Design: Would making the model longer help? I mean really, really, long, like stretch limo long. We pursued this idea, and timed our weirdly shapped vehicle. This failed miserably we gained about five seconds on our best time. SO we reverted to what we did have that worked.
Fifth Design: This last design modification was in the amount of gears. Our very first dragster had a gear ratio of about 81:1. That went really slow. So we lessened the gears to a 1:9 ratio in the beggining of today's work. During this gear modification, we changed the ratio to a 1:15 ratio. This worked well and we had a short time. Here is K2 in the final time trials.
We didn't do too bad. We placed as the fastest time. It was really cool, going from 27 seconds to 7.05 seconds. Really exciting. But, in the bragging right time race of all competitive cars, we didn't do as well.
In the time trials, we had the fastest time, but when it comes to a race, K2 placed third or fourth.
Second Design: Take a few blocks off of the dragster, giving it a triangular shape as one wheel was removed. Elongating the frame, gave a little more space, taking away the necessity of piling the PICO cricket, motor, and weight all next each other really close. Here, spreading out these components helped.
Third Design: The design was moving despite these improvements. We checked the batteries and found that they were dying. Replacing the batteries resulted in a much faster time, by about two seconds.
Four Design: Would making the model longer help? I mean really, really, long, like stretch limo long. We pursued this idea, and timed our weirdly shapped vehicle. This failed miserably we gained about five seconds on our best time. SO we reverted to what we did have that worked.
Fifth Design: This last design modification was in the amount of gears. Our very first dragster had a gear ratio of about 81:1. That went really slow. So we lessened the gears to a 1:9 ratio in the beggining of today's work. During this gear modification, we changed the ratio to a 1:15 ratio. This worked well and we had a short time. Here is K2 in the final time trials.
We didn't do too bad. We placed as the fastest time. It was really cool, going from 27 seconds to 7.05 seconds. Really exciting. But, in the bragging right time race of all competitive cars, we didn't do as well.
In the time trials, we had the fastest time, but when it comes to a race, K2 placed third or fourth.
Day Eight: Spinning and Twirling
Today we were given a few things to keep us occupied in class. The first was motion modules and the second, our dragsters. The dragsters require their own blog, so here I will metion the motion modules and our adventure there.
So motion modules are designs that were created by LEGO with instructions on how to build them. So this was probably one of the easier challenges we've had thus far. They were kinda' cool just the same. The first we built was called "Chomper." Like any sane person, when I heard that name I had flashbacks to Land Before Time and the baby T'rex Chomper. Here is our Chomper with his bulbous eyes.
Our second module we built was a catapult. Just by the name we had pictures of cannonballs shooting across the room. We built the contraption, but it didn't quite meet our expectations. I'll let you decide though. Here's our catapult.
So motion modules are designs that were created by LEGO with instructions on how to build them. So this was probably one of the easier challenges we've had thus far. They were kinda' cool just the same. The first we built was called "Chomper." Like any sane person, when I heard that name I had flashbacks to Land Before Time and the baby T'rex Chomper. Here is our Chomper with his bulbous eyes.
Our second module we built was a catapult. Just by the name we had pictures of cannonballs shooting across the room. We built the contraption, but it didn't quite meet our expectations. I'll let you decide though. Here's our catapult.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Day (forgotton): Last of the Sciborgs
I forgot to blog about this earlier, but here's a challenge that we were assigned that goes with our sciborgs.
Challenge six was a sensor challenge. Could we configure the buttons so that motor a is turned on when switch 1 is pressed and is off otherwise as well as motor b is on when switch 2 is pressed and is off
otherwise. It wasn't too hard, but here's a picture of our solution.
The second part to this challenge involved configuring the buttons so that pressing switch 1 reverses motor a on and off and pressing switch 2 reverses motor b. There is a hard and medium difficult solution to this problem. We wanted to at least get this problem done, before attempting to tackle the harder challenge, so we started out creating two stacks to run simultaneously.
Our programming seemed right, but when we tried to test it, the button failed to reverse the motor. So we asked the professor for help. When the professor came over, miraculously the button started working, and so we were like, "It wasn't working before you came over here." So the professor went away and we started to test it again and again it didn't work. The professor came over and it did work. Everytime we tried to test the button without the professor near, it wouldn't work. It was weird and crazy, we don't know quiet what happened. It was like something on Candid Camera.
So after finally getting the simpler version to work, my partner and I stared at the screen and attempted to create one stack in which the whole program would run. We came up with this, but it didn't work if both the buttons got pressed at once, so it wasn't a real success. Here is where we ended.
Challenge six was a sensor challenge. Could we configure the buttons so that motor a is turned on when switch 1 is pressed and is off otherwise as well as motor b is on when switch 2 is pressed and is off
otherwise. It wasn't too hard, but here's a picture of our solution.
The second part to this challenge involved configuring the buttons so that pressing switch 1 reverses motor a on and off and pressing switch 2 reverses motor b. There is a hard and medium difficult solution to this problem. We wanted to at least get this problem done, before attempting to tackle the harder challenge, so we started out creating two stacks to run simultaneously.
Our programming seemed right, but when we tried to test it, the button failed to reverse the motor. So we asked the professor for help. When the professor came over, miraculously the button started working, and so we were like, "It wasn't working before you came over here." So the professor went away and we started to test it again and again it didn't work. The professor came over and it did work. Everytime we tried to test the button without the professor near, it wouldn't work. It was weird and crazy, we don't know quiet what happened. It was like something on Candid Camera.
So after finally getting the simpler version to work, my partner and I stared at the screen and attempted to create one stack in which the whole program would run. We came up with this, but it didn't work if both the buttons got pressed at once, so it wasn't a real success. Here is where we ended.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Day Eight: The Fast and the Heavy
Our second challenge of the day was beggining construction on our dragsters. Our dragsters would need to be fast, but they also need to carry a weight. I think it was about one kilogram. We were given the restrictions of building the entire vehicle out of LEGOs. The strategy/new skill we learned about was gears and gear trains. The motors we used were fast, but not very powerful, so we need to add gears to gain power. When you add more gears you recceive more power, but less speed. The challenge centered around finding the perfect balance.
Every group started out with vastly different designs. We decided upon a rather nondescript car with four wheels and a whole bunch of gears in our gear chain. We had one of the biggest gear ratios in the class.
Here is our intial trial outcome.
Due to the design, we had issues when one button gets knocked slightly and pieces start to fall off. Everything needed to be balanced just right in order for the dragster(K2) to move. We fixed our design problems and tried a second run. We made it to the finish line this time....eventually.
Overall K2 came in second to last in the class time trials. We beat the big red fire truck, but still 27 second was a long time. We have a ways to go. The competitive cars were making it across in about 8-9 seconds.
Every group started out with vastly different designs. We decided upon a rather nondescript car with four wheels and a whole bunch of gears in our gear chain. We had one of the biggest gear ratios in the class.
Here is our intial trial outcome.
Due to the design, we had issues when one button gets knocked slightly and pieces start to fall off. Everything needed to be balanced just right in order for the dragster(K2) to move. We fixed our design problems and tried a second run. We made it to the finish line this time....eventually.
Overall K2 came in second to last in the class time trials. We beat the big red fire truck, but still 27 second was a long time. We have a ways to go. The competitive cars were making it across in about 8-9 seconds.
Day Seven: Tower of Terror Elevator Boxes
We've finally started to play with LEGOs. The task seemed simple enough. Create a box big enough to hold two weighted LEGO pieces. Secure it together using a technique we learned in class (pegs and plates) as well as your own unique design. The strategy to this task came with the second condition your box must encompass. The box must contain the weights and fall two meters to the ground, without breaking.
Two meters doesn't seem that high, but when the LEGOs crashed to the ground, withstanding a two meter drop seems practicably impossible. My first box failed epically when it made its impact with the earth. It was back to the drawing board, but I had a better game plan this time around anyway. I'd try to make the box a little smaller and not as big, hoping that this would allow for it to be a stronger box, less likely to break.
This strategy actually worked well. The second drop resulted in less pieces falling off. I tweeked a few conncections and tried a third time. Third time's the charm and I declared victory. Here's what my box looked like.
Two meters doesn't seem that high, but when the LEGOs crashed to the ground, withstanding a two meter drop seems practicably impossible. My first box failed epically when it made its impact with the earth. It was back to the drawing board, but I had a better game plan this time around anyway. I'd try to make the box a little smaller and not as big, hoping that this would allow for it to be a stronger box, less likely to break.
This strategy actually worked well. The second drop resulted in less pieces falling off. I tweeked a few conncections and tried a third time. Third time's the charm and I declared victory. Here's what my box looked like.
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