The theme for the project was Struggle, and our goal was to find a struggle that as many people as possible could experience or relate to. We decided to represent car crashes, as they can happen to everybody and are a very common occurrence in a big city like Chicago. Our plan was to use data from the Chicago data portal to pull the amount of car crashes that occurred in the past 168 hours (1 week) and display that by moving a car along a road that gets progressively more run-down and destroyed the higher the number gets. We decided this was an impactful way to demonstrate the data because it represents the amount of people in the present moment are experiencing the financial struggle of having to pay for damages or injury, and in extreme cases, the death of a loved one.
VisualDesign
In order to visually depict the contrast between a lower and higher number of crashes, we showed two different evironments on each side of the road. One side had green healthy grass, blue skies, and new buildings, while the other had darker grass, gray skies, and run-down buildings. When the number of crashes in the past week exceeded 5000, the car would move all the way to the damaged side, and when it fell below 4000, the car moved to the clean side.
InitialFeatures
In order to accomplish our goal of moving the car along the road, we decided to use a stepper motor as it was able to rotate freely and had the most torque out of all the available options. We also wanted viewers to know whether the number of car crashes was more or less than it was in the previous update, so we added Neopixel LED strips as headlights and taillights so that it was apparent which direction the car had recently traveled.
There were a couple main issues we had to face when constructing our idea, the first one being the issue of hiding the wires inside the car while still being able to allow it to move. We solved this by running the wires through the bottom of the car and cutting a long strip along the road, allowing the wires to move with the car while remaining out of view.
Another issue we ran into was that the motor initially was not strong enough to pull the car across the road. We realized that there was too much friction between the string and the cardboard, and the string was getting snagged on the jagged ends created by the exacto knife. To combat this, I snapped off the clip-ends from two mechanical pencils to use as a minimal-friction track for the string to run on. This ended up solving the problem, and the car moves with no issue.
TheArt
For the background, we decided to use crumpled tissue paper instead of flat construction paper to add some texture and make the background more cloudy. In order to show the contrast between the good and bad sides of the project, we used blue and gray skies as well as light green and dark green patches of grass. The buildings in the background also become more wrecked as the project moves rightward.
Some additional touches we included were a cardboard traffic light and some signs to display the number of car crashes that had occurred. Since the car is pretty big relative to the signs, we added a white tick mark in the middle of the car so it is clear which value is being displayed.
















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