Presentation and Final Plan

Presentation feedback was helpful and fair in my opinion. It's true that we don't have enough time to do a full blown complex animation that's layered. But there IS a better way which I'll cover later further down, I talked about it briefly in the previous blog post.

Some suggestions were offered to us both before and during the presentation. Prior to the presentation an option was to have still images where the animation would be revealed through changing colours. During the presentation there were a variety based off the still image alternative. For example, changing patterns on the wall or something similar to comic book style changes in image. So it's a little like an animation. Another was to simply have a series of still images revealed by different colours and to spin around or run around to animate them. These are "nice" but inelegant solutions on what we can do with hiding and revealing certain colours. These dumb down the idea and it isn't what we do. So we've clearly ignored these and come up with a better solution that fits what we want.

At presentation I showed the latest RGB light test. Some colours work, some don't. In the final it won't need the Arduino at all and to clarify, none of the colour orders would be predetermined. That depends on where the user turns the gears.




How do the gears connect to the lights? With potentiometers. Jason says you can get potentiometers that turn right around continuously. Before we knew that though I found an example of a particular gear type that can change directions (Chou, 2007).



We were planning on using that to be able to turn the potentiometers smoothly so that there's not a big change from full brightness to no brightness.



Andy suggested that the gears push buttons at specific points to turn the LEDs on and off. I think a saw-tooth shaped gear like those in escapements would work great for that.

Figure 1. An example of an escapement gear with saw-tooth shape. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scappamento.gif

However, a smooth transition is preferred rather than flashes so we're going to stick with the original gear in mind. This is also because we couldn't actually find any potentiometers that could spin around forever. As for taking apart the potentiometer, that's another option. However, it allows more chances for human error and wastage. We don't have time for that.

So what's the final plan? The final plan is to have gears controlling the turning of the potentiometers --> the potentiometers change the colour of light --> the colour of light hides and reveals certain printed colours --> moving printed bars on transparencies over them reveal an animation.

Content of the animation and the theme that pulls all elements together conceptually: struggling to find unity as a group when it comes to this project. So basically it's about unity and putting pieces together into one whole. It's the story of how this project is the way it is.



Reference List

Chou, R. [Roger Chou]. (2007, August 2). Gear System that Changes Direction [Video file]. 
       Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aobPgGzB-U