Week 17 - lglik/Portfolio GitHub Wiki

12/17/18 - 12/21/18

Day One:

I enlisted the help of one of the design students in making an acrylic plate to go around all of the trees. We used calipers and the existing CAD file of the project to figure out what the dimensions for the plate should be. The other student used CAD to design and then a laser cutter to make the acrylic plate. I was able to get the plate to fit and the tolerances are pretty small which is nice so it fit quite snugly. The acrylic is very glossy and while there will be filings resting on top of it, there may still be some acrylic sticking through. I spent a few hours carefully painting the acrylic plate with some matte black paint. I had to use several coats of paint, but once it was dry, the plate blended nicely into the background.

The electromagnets with the permanent magnets taken off and the new acrylic bottom plate.

Day Two:

I very carefully cleaned off 33 of the new magnets and the tops of the electromagnets with isopropyl alcohol. I then used super glue to attach these new magnets. Now that I had determined how to make the magnets to have the best possible effect, I needed to figure out what substance would work best. I had 5 different types of iron filings from different suppliers so I out the filings onto 5 separate trees and observed them. There were many characteristics to consider. Some trees were shinier, some moved more, some showed the EM field with more detail, etc. I also created as many mixtures of different filings as I could and observed those as well. I reached some preliminary conclusions but did not settle on any one mixture today.

The project with the new acrylic and the new magnets installed.

Day Three:

I made some more mixtures of the iron filings today. All of these ferromagnetic substances were purchased last year to potentially be used on the project. One of the things I was mixing was synthetic ferrous oxide. It was a very fine powder that was extremely black, moldable, stuck to itself, and stained everything it touches. The mixture that had been used in the previous year was a combination of one of the types of iron filings and the synthetic dust. The project shut off overnight and one of the batteries was completely drained which should not have happened. When I looked out the program's output, it kept thinking it was using the battery with the higher voltage. Eventually, the project had so little power that things just stopped working. Obviously, something is wrong

Day Four:

While I still have not been able to get the project to run overnight successfully, the trees with the different combinations of filings had still been running for quite some time at this point. The synthetic filings stain, are very dark, and are barely magnetic. For some reason, the students last year decided that it would be beneficial to mix this synthetic dust with the other filings. Doing so only makes the trees worse, harder to see, stain more, and have less movement. After having to deal with the magnetic dust staining everything for weeks at this point now, I was pretty much ready to throw the synthetic filings away. The two types of filings now being considered were not synthetic and both had a silvery sheen to them. To minimize variables, I placed both in the same position under different lights in the project to accurately compare how they look. The board to read to the voltage of the batteries seemed pretty much nonfunctional. The values outputted seemed completely unrelated to the actual values of the batteries. For example:

A table showing a comparison of the output values from the board and the values found using a multi-meter.

Day Five:

I tried hooking up a power supply to the board and seeing the difference between the voltage displayed on the power supply and what was outputted by my program. After some trial and error, I discovered that unless batteries were plugged into the board, the values would fluctuate around wildly -- even giving some negative voltages. Before now, I had my code switch to whichever battery had a higher voltage, but I learned that it is better for the longevity of a battery to stay at full charge. Therefore, I will need to change the code to run off of just one battery until that one is depleted, and only then, switch to the other. Today, we settled on the silver-ish iron filings. I will need to clean off all the trees and make new trees with this type of filing. I spent some time working on getting ready for the break. I helped clean up the room, I cleaned up by project and made sue to provide myself with enough documentation to pick up where I left off when I return in January.