HW 3: Automaton, LED Exercises

PART 1: Exercises 1, 2, 3

Below is the circuit I used for all three exercises. One leg of the button is connected to ground, and the other to 5V. When the switch is activated, the current will flow through both legs and activate the LED.

The main problem that I encountered in these exercises was that I mixed up the ground and power wires. Since I had them mixed, the LED was always on, and would turn off when I pressed on the button. This is because the default mode would be that the push button is connected to the 5v and the when the button is pressed the current would travel through the other leg of the button to ground, turning it off.

PART 2 : Automaton

Ideation

Overall, the automaton took me many hours from ideation to implementation. My initial ideas were an android fighting with a sticky marshmallow and an android shooting an apple into a basket but in the end I chose to work on an android chasing an apple.

Iterations

I then traced the outlines of my automaton on Illustrator. The first time, the three holes that would hold the gears were too far apart, which gave the gears a lot of friction. I also mixed up some of the sides of the box (confused the front of the box for the top). In the second iteration, I wanted the front of the box to have two square holes for peeking. They were way too small. I also realized that I had forgotten to include two holes on the top for the android and apple to go through. In my last iteration, I drew two holes, cut out the front of the box, and included a small crank.

I mostly used hot glue to join dowels with laser cut pieces. This proved to be very inefficient as the pieces would frequently break apart. I also used blue tape in the back of the automaton to prevent the gears from slipping.

Lessons

I realized that I did not spend enough time sketching and ideating ways to connect small pieces instead of resorting to using glue. I think that using glue is actually more time consuming than designing linkage mechanisms. I will also attempt more challenging ideas. I spent many hours on this project, but the amount of time probably could have been reduced for these reasons.