This week was a hugmongous struggle. We only have 2 weeks left to present our prototype and we still haven’t started building yet. We are still trying to figure out some of the hardware and how to build.
On Thursday, the biggest incident happened! We LOST the neopixels!!! We packed them up on Wednesday after working with them but they went missing on Thursday! “SOMEONE STOLE OUR NEOPIXELS!!!” $40 worth of lights missing. It is in fact one of the most important visual part of our project.
After the missing neopixels incident happened we are now struggling to find solutions. Do we buy another $40 strip of neopixels? Do we use other replacement? What do we do? We haven’t even started building yet. Therefore we have decided! We are going to have to change our plans. We are going to have to go small. With a long discussion we figured that it would be impossible to get the acrylic cut without any resources and we still couldn’t find a solution to make the top acrylic bend. Unfortunately, the stepper motor is just not working...
Our conclusion is to make a smaller version that is doable in 2 weeks time. This can be done using cardboard boxes as a mini version of the room, a poster tube as the base of the tree and stacked up semi-transparent q-tip holders as the top of the tree (moving part). “But we already have the acrylic... it would go to a waste. Can we use it in any way?” So we decided that we would used the acrylic tubes to show the finale version of our project with the RFID tag and some lights on the acrylic tube that would send information to the smaller version to make the servo move to an angle. For the ceiling version we will just create the same poster tube, q-tip holders and servo but hanging down from another cardboard box.
Finally with the conclusion of our discussion we have solved the issue of time. And also by using our detective mode we found out a student from another class took our neopixel strip thinking no one was using them.
WHAT WE WORKED ON
This week we meet up multiple times out of class to work on the neopixels responding to the RFID tag and photoresistor. We had many misunderstandings of how the neopixels were supposed to react but came to an agreement. We also tried to test the stepper motor again, but to no avail... we tried all different codes and wiring ways, but it’s just not working... we also worked on a plan and final decision of the prototype. This resulted , with the conclusion to create a smaller version so that the servo motor would be able to move the top of the tree to an angle. We also need to continue to think of ways to make the servo arm stay in the q-tip holder and have it move to a 45-90 degree angle and back.