This homework assignment consisted of building an automaton from laser cutting and using the Arduino to do three experiments with LEDs.
Automaton: Ski-Rex
For this assignment, I decided to focus more on making the mechanism work, so my actual automaton figure was a printable that I found online. Last week, I spent a lot of time trying to make my mechanism look well designed, as well as functional, and ended up very disappointed. Thus, I took it back a notch this week and made a simple linkage/ crank mechanism. In the end, I decided to add some texture to the acrylic, and etched the title "SKI-REX" and a snowy mountain range on the enclosure. I chose the figure "Ski-Rex" not only to fulfill the "humor" requirement, but also because I love puns!
I didn't have too many issues, but I did have one major problem-- the linkages that move the skis were too long, something I didn't discover until after assembling the entire mechanism portion. Sadly, to fix it, I had to break all of the (acrylic cemented) pieces apart and saw the linkages shorter, as the laser cutter was busy. The hardest part was figuring out how to make the connection between the linkage point and the ski slider, which I ended up doing with an accordion folded strip acting as a hinge. Another issue that I came across was the unfamiliarity of working with acrylic cement. I consistently used too much and my pieces didn't dry in the proper positions, or the cement would drip to places I didn't want it to. Finally, part way through assembling the actual T-Rex, I ran out of rubber cement, so I ended up using wood glue as a sub in. A lot of pieces are also super glued together.
Arduino: Three Examples of LEDs with Buttons
I found this portion of the project to be very straightforward. The only part I had issues with was that sometimes the button didn't quite "click" in the exact way that was needed for the proper connection, so the button effect wasn't completely changed. The short videos below illustrate each of the three experiments. As far as the third one goes, the problem is that the old_val and val are both 0. One of them needs to be 1 in order for the button state variable to have any meaning.
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