It's over already?

Our blogs were due two hours and 16 minutes ago, but I wanted to write a post quickly on this class as a whole.  I'm keeping it short to minimize sappiness.

I have enjoyed every moment of EXTD 160 and am amazed, looking back, at how much I've learned!  I've developed a new appreciation for engineering, and found myself beginning to see from an engineer's perspective in my other classes (particularly my exoplanet research class, ASTR 107, and my space exploration and technology class at MIT.  It's kind of strange how these three classes intertwined). I discovered new abilities in myself, such as my apparent knack for soldering, and got a good taste of electrical engineering/circuitry on which I'm looking forward to expanding in physics next semester.

It occurred to me thursday that I won't be having a class in the engineering lab next semester, and I realized that I now can't imagine a semester at Wellesley without spending ridiculous amounts of time in this lab.  As cheesy as this sounds, I feel like I've discovered a hidden jewel here at Wellesley and know I will always feel at home among the soldering irons, laser cutter and 3D printer.

Lastly, thank you Oscar for attempting to teach engineering to a bunch of non-engineers.  I hope you enjoyed working with us as much as we enjoyed learning from you!  And to my classmates, I've had a blast and I hope to see you all around in the lab next year!

Live Long and Prosper,

Hannah

Harry Potter Interactive Pop-up Adventure! (3.5.12)

From 6pm wednesday night to 5am thursday morning, Kelsey, Erin and I completely reworked our final project.  After being told our project was not interactive enough, Kelsey suggested that we create a choose-your-own-adventure (like the Goosebumps series) pop-up with six pages.  She wrote the text for each page and we sketched out a rough story-board with the circuits we wanted on each page.

Because I had the most artistic ability among us three, I was tasked with engineering the pop-ups on each page and drawing the art while Erin and Kelsey designed and soldered our circuits.  What follows is a long series of photos documenting our 11 hours in the engineering lab!  I'll start with the finished page, then a photo of the text, then close up and photos of the process to make each page.

Page 1:

We put LEDs behind three of the floating candles in the great hall.  When the reader pulls down Hedwig's tab to have her fly to Harry, she covers a photo-resistor which causes the LED's to flicker, the way Hedwig's flapping would cause candles to flicker in real life.

Page 2:

Page 3:

Pulling the tabs on the left signify using the polyjuice potion, while pulling the right tabs uses the invisibility cloak.

 Page 4:

The text is hard to read in this image.  It says:

Ron, disguided as Snape meets Malfoy in the corridor and tells him that he has failed potions.  Little did Ron know that Malfoy had just come out of the dungeon, where he had been discussing potions with the real Snape.  Malfoy notices Ron's battered shoes and recodnizes that he is a Weasley immediately.  He brushes off the comment, saying that his father will buy him a passing grade and, knowing that he is definitely up to something, stealthily follows Ron outside the castle where he meets Harry and Hermione.  Don't forget to turn off the lights, both switches, before you go to page 5.

The later it got, the cooler our circuits looked.

 At around 3am I decided we needed a comfy place to rest, so I hijacked one of the couches on the second floor of the science center (it has since been returned).  It was quite nice.

Page 5:

Depending on the decisions made by the reader earlier in the story, either red or green will shine from two bicolor LED's in the center of Hogwart's castle (we used the same laser cut designs from the older version of our project).

Erin made a drawing of our circuit for this page:

Depending on the color, you read one of two narrations:

Page 6:



Image courtesy of Erin :)

I created a table that twists 90 degrees as it is opened or closed.

 

Photo courtesy of Erin

Our circuits on the bottom!

Also, my desk was only kinda messy by the time we hit 5am....


Photo courtesy of Erin

Our Book Grows (30.4.12)

Today we worked on creating a sturdy base for our pop-up and decided once and for all to make more pages.  If we can get it done in time, we ideally would like to create one page for each installment in the Harry Potter series, but at the moment decided that, in addition to our completed page shown below, Erin, Kelsey and I would each work on one page so that we will have at least four in the end.

Our completed page illustrates the final battle between Harry and Voldemort (7th Book) and uses LEDs to simulate the spells being cast my each wizard.  You can see the unlit LEDs sticking out near the fold in the Hogwarts Castle.  This is, however, only a prototype; we plan to cut each page using various colors of cardstock and add more illustration on each page.

Erin is working on a page with a basilisk (2nd Book) whose eyes light up and are controlled by a photo resistor such that the user of our pop-up can turn-off the basilisk's eyes with their finger.  Kelsey is working on a hippogriff with movable wings (3rd Book) which will be a page focusing more on pop-up design/ paper engineering.  My page will show Bellatrix with a movable arm so that she can touch her wand to her dark mark.  On the other side of the page we will have a light-up dark mark in the sky.

Our entire book will be supported by a cardboard lid we found in the engineering lab.  The flat top of the lid will have the pages fastened, and our circuits will pass through the lid to the back where we attached two breadboards to handle all our circuitry.  I exacto-knifed a hole in the side so that our power supply can pass through the side (we chose to do this over attaching eight AA batteries, which is what would have been necessary to power our pop-up).

Shown below is our circuit with two red and green bicolor LEDs which we will attach to our Hogwarts pop-up in the final scene between Harry and Voldemort.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Harry Potter series, my page features Bellatrix and the dark mark tattoo as seen below:

http://heidihastings.deviantart.com/art/Bellatrix-190292381

The Dark Mark in the sky:

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110401033142/harrypotterwiki2/images/3/3d/Dark_Mark.jpg

Buckbeak the Hippogriff:

http://darksuperpuffyclouds.webs.com/photos/null/buckbeak.bmp

The Basilisk:

http://www.fearnet.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20101018/HP02_basalisk.jpg

Silhouettes and Stained-Glass (26.4.12)

Today I worked on creating the pieces of our pop-up, while Erin and Kelsey worked on designing the circuits for our flashing lights.  Once again  Bézier curves saved the day, making it almost effortless to design silhouettes of Harry and Voldemort.

The snapshop below shows the completed Harry figure and the beginning of Voldemort.

I start by creating a bunch of straight Bézier curves in a rough outline of what I want the figure to look like.  Then I make each node curved and make the curves on the left and right of each node independent from each other.

We decided to add a scar and the outline of glasses on Harry and added an eye on Voldemort.  After that, we cut the design out of card stock with the laser cutter.  We changed the power to 10%, the velocity to 130, and made the frequency of the laser 1000 instead of 10000, which is it's usual setting.  The first try only engraved the paper, so we upped the power to 20% and came out with these two figures below:

[ I leaned them against my computer screen. That's Erin and I in the background :) ]

Our final figures will probably be cut from black card stock so that they better resemble silhouettes, but for now, creating these prototypes was exciting!  This weekend I will be designing a Hogwarts castle and will begin engineering the other elements of our pop-up.

In addition, I was working on a side project to create a stained-glass inspired window decoration to give as a gift for a good friend.  I used an axonometric grid and Bézier curves once again, and used layers to make a preliminary sketch and a final product, which is shown below.

Cutting it was a little difficult because not all the pieces came out cleanly, but after some carefully placed pressure on the pieces and some clean-up work with the filer (we don't have sand paper in the lab, oddly enough), I'm fairly pleased with the result (and hopefully my friend be will too!).