Cameron and Daniel's Page |
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03/06/2002
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Dan and I experienced some difficulties with programing last week. Daniel tried and tried to program the tree’s cricket, But nothing seemed to work. After tampering with the tree, we tried a hand at the elephant. We came across many problems with both with the animals and the tree. Because of these problems, we needed to program back and forth. Today, we had an argument whether or not a small lump of cardboard should be Mt. Kilimanjaro or not. Also, I need to make bushes to cover our crickets and gears.
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03/20/2002
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11:13 A.M. Hippo and Rhino Mechanical Structure
For our Hippo’s and Rhino’s mechanical structure, we used the idea of the gear rack. It is mostly made up of thick lego blocks, racks, tooth gears, axels, beams, and full stops. We also used round connecting blocks to connect the axels to the beams. The use of the beams are as stands or sticks for our puppets. The round connecting blocks surve as a sturdy base. We chose to use axels both because they are black like the background will be and because they are very straight and stiff so the puppet stands up straight. The mechanical structure is pretty much a straight, and long structure made of thick lego blocks. The whole thing is pretty much just a very sturdy base. On the top are smooth topped skinny legos. The purpose of these are to help the beams run smoothly on them. The beams have racks on the tops of them. There is also a motor with a large axel on the front of it. On the end of the axel is a tooth gear. When the tooth gear touches the racks it gets caught in the grooves. When the motor starts up, it makes the axel spin. Because the tooth gear is conected to the end, and the tooth gear is in the grooves of the racks, when the motor starts up and spins, the beams move back and forth. There are two of these on either side of one structure. They both do the same thing, but they are each timed to do it. |
03/20/2002
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It is now the 20th and Dan and I have made great progress. I have made all of the bushes, Daniel has finished the programing, and the lump is now Mt. Kilimanjaro. Everything is running very smoothly and I have typed up the story. Dan is typing up MECHANICS OF THE TREE right now. We have signaled the right time to start telling the story. We can only press the buttons when whoever is reading says the line ‘They were Elephant, Rhino, and Hippo’. After that line is said, we can press the buttons on each cricket, all at the same time. We have read the story at least three times and everything has worked almost perfectly. |
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04/10/2002
This is the procedure for the hippo. It makes the hippo wait for a while, and then it is told to move forward. It then goes forward, then back, then forward again, and back again. The last time it comes back, it goes forward one last time and so do all of the other animals because at the end they all have to go at the same time. |
These are the procedures for the hippo and for the rhino. Even though they are connected by the same structure, they both have different motors and different procedures. All of the procedures took some time and patience to make. We needed to make sure that everything did what it was supposed to, when it was supposed to so that they wouldn't all do something else all at the same time. First was the elephant, so we needed to talk through what it needed to do and how long that might take. Then we needed to program the elephant to go that long. Then We needed to make the elephant draw back a little bit and we knew this would take some work. We ended up taking a very, very long time on the elephant, so we decided to move straight on to the tree and hippo. This too took a long time. Trying to do two things at once that is. After a long time of programing, I finally made a fourth character. Because we had nowhere else to put it, Daniel got and idea of making a structure to connect them both. After this was made, we realized that we could not program them to do two different things on one motor. We decided to make two different connections for each animal and each one had its own motor. Finally, we had tried a program for each motor, but they all went at once. I think we had the most trouble with the rhino and hippo. We had a lot of trouble with the rhino and hippo because they both went at the same time. Daniel realized he hadn't programed them to wait long enough so he tried a number of times to wait, when he finally thought of one. When we finished programing, There was still a lot of work to do left. There were a number of tasks to do like make bushes, little trees, and a small village. This probably took me three to four days at the most. When we finished, we were ready to be interviewed and videotaped. |
04/24/2002
This picture came from a book by David Macaulay, and it is called The Way Things Work. |
Here is a picture of a gearbox. It is an example of the design we used to make the tree. The gearbox is used in many different machines. The picture is one from a quartz clock. The gear box is used to control the speed and power of each gear causing the last gear to rotate at the speed you desire. We chose to use this for our tree because we needed to control the tree's speed and power. |
05/01/2002
| This is an example of the mechanics we used to make our animals move. The picture is of a juicer. It uses a rack and pinion design to squeeze the juice out of a fruit. The rack and pinion design is a gear that turns and pushes the rack forward. |
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05/02/2002
| What you are about to see are two videos recording our progress. The first is an interview asking us about what problems or situations that we had. The second is an actual recording of our puppet show.
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