Wooden mock up for drawing machine

This is the paint pyramid that two of our guys went to make in the 3D labs. It's a smaller, wooden version of the real one that we're going to make out of perspex. The yellow wool suspends the paint pyramid.



These are the sensors that we're probably going to use. What sensors we're going to use hasn't been finalised yet. At the moment we're thinking ultrasonic to sense proximity of people, sound sensor to react to loudness of sounds and maybe a light sensor.



And these are our motors, which are going to be part of a pulley system to make the tilt of the pyramid in reaction to the various sensors. This will let the 3 pots of paint pour some of their paint over on to the base where it will mix and make interesting patterns of paint. Then drip through the corners of the base to make multicoloured splashes on a large piece of paper underneath the pyramid. This will give you a 2 layered 3D painting. The first layer is in the base of the pyramid and the second is the paper underneath.


The motors will be mounted in a wooden box above the pyramid. That hole is where the wool is fed through, tied to the motors. Then when the motors rotate it will pull up and gather the wool/let go of some of the wool.


This is what it looks like from the side in suspension.



Everything seems to be going smoothly and everyone is doing fantastic in their specific roles so all areas are running very efficiently. The machine is already built, wooden mock up works nicely, experiments with the paint are going well---things left to do is to try out the paint on the wooden mock up to make sure that the type of paint is suitable and to see how much of it we would need. We still need paint pots made from styrofoam cups and start programming the machine.

Thoughts on teamwork: Assign different roles for different people. Don't let the entire team do the exact same thing as this will limit productivity and maybe not let various issues you come across to be solve efficiently enough to make adequate improvements. This way you have at least one person discovering the possible problems you're going to have in EACH area at the same time which allows for the solving of problems to occur simultaneously in each area you're looking after. If the whole team does that same thing you're only going to solve 1 problem at a time whereas setting role can solve as least 2 problems at a time. The important thing to the multi-role approach is to let your other team members know what you're doing so that they can understand your area too and help you solve your particular area's issues with you. This way the team as a whole can develop the design together.