Rapid Fire
The objective of rapid fire was to build something that could shoot elastic bands to knock over cups. Our device was made of corrugated plastic, a pencil and a clothespin. We were able to knock over some of the cups, but our device was not very accurate. It also took a while to load as the device was very finicky and fragile. The tension from the elastic bands caused it to bend and twist.
Spaghetti Bridge
Each team was required to design a bridge that spanned 12 inches and would hold a load of two pounds. Also, a golf ball needed to be able to roll across, which meant we needed to design the bridge with an angle. After each team completed their design they then built another teams bridge design. I felt that the design that we were building looked very nice on paper. However, due to the fact that the bridge was 40 inches long, there was not enough time to finish construction and the end product did not look appealing as it was not complete. Next time I would convince the engineers to make the bridge smaller as the 40 inch length greatly exceeded the 12 inch span. This would allow us to have more time to build and make it visually appealing. We used all of the materials provided to us and required extra tape due to the size of the bridge. We used tape to hold the spaghetti together and the elastics to keep up the part that the ball rolled down on.
Recycled Furniture
Unfortunately I was very ill during most of this project. Our recycled furniture was a chair that turned on a light when you sat on it. The recycled material that we used was cardboard. We used hot glue and tape to configure the cardboard. It was difficult to make a chair that could support someone using these materials, but we were able to get it done. The wiring was faulty due to the type of wire used. Therefore, the electronics did not always work. In future designs better methods to wire the electronics need to be implemented.
Smart House
This was a very challenging and detailed project. It took a lot of time, both at school and at home, to complete. By working on the project together we were able to get everything that we wanted to implement into our smart house done and all the electronics working. Although somethings took longer than we would have liked, like building the house and the programming for the electro-assembly, we were able to get everything done in the end. We had some challenges with the materials provided for the build. As an example, the MDF split apart easily when nailed and it soaked up a lot of glue when we were trying to assemble.
Our Smart Home used two Raspberry Pis (RPi) in our project. One RPi was used to operate a camera at the front door of the home for security and the second RPi was used to control a contact closure switch alarm system with a keypad. We also used an Arduino to control our home LED lighting and the bathroom fan. The LED lighting was made from blue and RGB LEDs that were glued to a 1/4" grid plastic mesh that covered the ceiling of the smart home. The fan that the Arduino controlled was turned on and off by a temperature sensor. When the temperature got too high it would turn on the fan and then turn off the fan when the temperature dropped sufficiently.
Our Smart Home used two Raspberry Pis (RPi) in our project. One RPi was used to operate a camera at the front door of the home for security and the second RPi was used to control a contact closure switch alarm system with a keypad. We also used an Arduino to control our home LED lighting and the bathroom fan. The LED lighting was made from blue and RGB LEDs that were glued to a 1/4" grid plastic mesh that covered the ceiling of the smart home. The fan that the Arduino controlled was turned on and off by a temperature sensor. When the temperature got too high it would turn on the fan and then turn off the fan when the temperature dropped sufficiently.
Everyday Robotic Challenge
Our everyday robot was a security robot with a camera that did facial recognition to detect if the person was supposed to be on the property. The build of the robot went by without any problems. We used VEX hardware and a VEX controller for our robot . Then we used a Raspberry Pi, installed on the top of the robot, to detect faces. The hardest part of this project was trying to get the facial recognition software downloaded onto the Raspberry Pi. It took a long time to figure out a way to do that, because the libraries were not downloaded properly and we had to keep installing additional libraries. Once we got the software downloaded getting the facial recognition to work, using the Raspberry Pi, was pretty easy. This was a good working prototype, but if we were to do something like this in the future I would make some significant design improvements. One improvement I would like to see would be to control the robot with the Raspberry Pi so that the robot could follow the person if they are an intruder.