Creating the Looks-Like Model

Last class, Kat and I built a model of our "vision" for the end goal, particularly regarding the "Look." We want the display to be fun, inviting, aesthetically pleasing and, of course, easy to understand. To go about creating such a model, we broke down the display into parts: we knew we would need a bike with the back wheel mounted up off the floor; a generator attached to the spinning wheel; and also an inverter between the generator and the board to keep the current in check for safety reasons.

We started by cutting all of the electronic pieces out of foam and then used glue, paint, markers, etc. to construct and decorate them, close to their realistic counterparts. Fortunately, the Engineering Lab had a bike and a bike mount that we can use (though we found this long after Kat put all her energy into creating a lovely makeshift mount herself...).
Kat's Makeshift Bike Mount
Originally, we had planned on connecting the bike to the generator using a belt, but, after finding several generator-motor designs online, we realized that the bike wheel could be placed right against the generator gear for simplicity. Our design was updated to reflect that, as well as the light and electronics display on the circuit board -- the informational/educational part of the project.

We also saw it fit to include a voltmeter, for participants to see in units how much power they were producing by pedaling, and an "Energy-o-Meter" that indicates to the pedaler if they're pedaling just about right, should slow down or needs to stop (for safety precautions). We added other electrical appliances,
e.g. a hairdryer, radio and outlet, to allow pedalers to power or charge items relatable to their life. As far as the Final Project goes, we spoke with Professor Elaine Igo and she helped us realize that we had a lot of calculations and careful circuit-board construction to do before we could begin building. For instance, the 12V generator we originally planned on using may not be enough to light even two bulbs at once (for the average pedaler) and we may need to purchase a motor capable of producing up to 360 Watts. We now need to calculate how much current the average person can pedal. Back to the drawing board.

The Looks-Like model is both representative of what we hope our final version will look like as well as be seen by the user. We truly hope our display is attractive to potential users and, hence, used a variety of colors. However, the model is incredibly simple, as the Final Project will have a complex Mechanical-to-Electrical-Energy conversion mechanism, a detailed circuit on the back of the board to that adequately distributes the power. Overall, the actual build should be simple if we plan ahead properly. We feel more certain about the task since talking to Prof. Igo and are ready to deal with the pre-ordering and discovery stage. We're one step closer to making this vision a reality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hackathon: TechTogether Boston

Image
iOS app Last weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Boston's largest all-female and non-binary hackathon! A group of friends and I wanted to digest as much tech and nerd information as possible, and we basically made it our mission to go to nearly every workshop session offered for two days straight. I don't know how we managed this but we did. From 5p on Friday and all day on Saturday, it seemed I bounced from one room to the next with a nap here and there. There was a workshop on rapid prototyping with AdobeXD -- which I am in love with. Then, I was able to create my first phone application during a workshop on iOS app development with Swift  (it's much easier than I had imagined), followed by a workshop at 2am on Android app developmen t. For my very first hackathon-conference, I wanted to focus on skill development and learning, rather than the competition. However, seeing everyone so wrapped up in their individual designs and programming ...
Read more

Women of Color in Graduate School

Image
Recently, I've been asked (by a few people) how it feels to go through graduate school as a woman of color. And, to be completely honest, it's incredibly exciting and exhausting all at the same time. Being a woman of color -- specifically a black woman, particularly in STEM -- has a lot of challenges. If you simply search the phrase "black in graduate school," you will get statistics that are very humbling; articles and think-pieces on how different the Black or person-of-color experience is from students who are not minorities; and other outlets detailing how little support many Black and non-Black students of color feel that they have. In fact, the Council on Graduate Schools recently reported that, in 2017, Black students made up just 11.9% of all first-time graduate students in the United States. (That said, 68% of them were women! So, we are making p r o g r e s s.) I'm not sure what the numbers are at Boston University, but it doesn't seem that far o...
Read more

Truss Design (Final)

Image
We finally made it to the end! After the preliminary design report, it was time to finalize our actual design (since we were given enough materials to make one truss to test). After doing a few more draft sketches and analysis, I was able to pick up on patterns on which types of designs produced the maximum strength (all within the parameters we were given). Finally, I came up with the sketch at the bottom-right, and the MATLAB analysis produced the highest load we were able to reach. We theorized that: two members would buckle first instead of just one (Members 3 and 4); the maximum load is 11.62 ± 0.063N; and the total cost of the truss is $290 (under the budget limit). From there, we moved to prototyping: we cut the straws as close as possible to the lengths specified in our final design. To create uniform gusset plates, our "joints," we used the circular cap of an individual Tropicana Orange Juice bottle. It met the area requirements and acted as a stamp...
Read more