Week 08 - lglik/Portfolio GitHub Wiki

10/10/18 - 10/16/18

Day One:

No class - senior activities day

Day Two:

I continued to talk with others and go through tutorials to try to catch up on what I missed. I worked with Blake to improve the comments and the readability of some of the SlushEngine code. We looked through the code and expanded on many of the descriptions and obfuscated acronyms. Later, I began work on an exhibit that will be heading to the Moxy museum! The exhibit is called "Magnetic Dancing Trees." The magnetic trees project is a cluster of electromagnets with iron filings on them. The magnets can be turned on and off using the GUI on a tablet and can be made to turn on and off in patterns and sequences. The project was mostly completed last year, and my job is to remove the need to switch between batteries manually. For today, I just worked on how to get the project running.

The "Magnetic Trees"

Day Three:

Because of the backflow of current when the electromagnets are turned off, the project cannot receive power directly from an outlet. Instead, it runs off of rechargeable batteries that act as a large capacitor. There are two pairs of batteries so the project runs on two while the other two charge. Right now, the only way to tell which battery is full is by looking at the LEDs on them and then you have to manually select which batteries to use. I intend to change this by installing a circuit that detects the status of each battery and then uses that information to draw power from the fully charged one. I started work on this today by experimenting with the Gui and familiarizing myself with the code.

Day Four:

I explored the code further today to really understand how it works. Some of the existing code is not that great, but given the small time frame before the project will be sent to a museum, it didn't really make sense for me to change it.I made some changes that I think are improvements to the GUI. The first step of the hardware modifications was to cut off the heat shrink on the batteries, attach new wires to the leads, and put new heat I started the first step of the hardware modifications by starting to take the heat shrink off the batteries. I learned that the batteries are quite powerful, so much so that they could even be used for welding! This knowledge made cutting off the heat shrink and exposing the batteries even more terrifying.

Day Five:

The wire attach to the battery by putting a nut and bolt through both a ring terminal on the end of the wire and one of the leads on the battery. I learned how to use a new crimper and to crimp ring terminals on the ends of wires. I measured out the length the wires would have to be roughly and cut 4 wires to that length with 2 wires for each battery. I also twisted the wires together using a power drill to make everything a bit cleaner. I crimped the wires and then attached them very carefully to the batteries. This step was a bit dangerous since the wrench I was suing on the batteries was solid metal and if it touched both ends, I could have hurt myself badly.

The two pairs of batteries