Monday, February 4, 2008
PRONG - Proto 01 experiments
PRONG here,
Lindsey and I (Josh) have been working with Little Guy (AKA the circuit board) and we've gotten a grip on how it works in a few important ways:
- The Flexinol wire's natural state is contracted. Current makes it expand. You can conclude from this that the system that is controlled by the Nitinol will be one that works by the materials expansion. That may mean that the system would be in a contracted state which then grows or expands with environmental input into an uncontracted or relaxed state.
- The way the breadboard works: The circuit logic is horizontal. Everything communicates along horizontal paths. It doesn't matter where that path is vertically on the white grid of the board.
- Wherever there is an input on any row in the white grid it needs to travel along another wire and continue and complete a circuit.
- It looks like the Horizontal and Vertical Black components of the board need to both be plugged in to to make a complete circuit
- Alligator clip order, one way or the other, doesn't matter. the circuit still works.
- We were having trouble because the battery was weak. A new battery fixed everything
- An important experiment might be to measure the precise percentage of expansion for a given length of nitinol so that we can fabricate a system that exploits it. We will probably need to use mechanical advantage to make it show up. That means using the Nitinol as if it were a small gear on a big wheel...like a ten speed.
- we played with PBASIC - a little about debugging and the important command RCTIME which controls the conditional logic of the wire
- the amount of milliseconds used for the looping or IF statements matters. 4000 looks like a good number for the wire to fully expand and contract. But we say quick oscillations with as little as 500. After that we couldn't see it. This is nice because we might be able to control velocity or speed of reaction in a project
- I sketched a fabric membrane idea and Lindsey and I discussed it. A possible experiment based on Proto 01
Lindsey and I (Josh) have been working with Little Guy (AKA the circuit board) and we've gotten a grip on how it works in a few important ways:
- The Flexinol wire's natural state is contracted. Current makes it expand. You can conclude from this that the system that is controlled by the Nitinol will be one that works by the materials expansion. That may mean that the system would be in a contracted state which then grows or expands with environmental input into an uncontracted or relaxed state.
- The way the breadboard works: The circuit logic is horizontal. Everything communicates along horizontal paths. It doesn't matter where that path is vertically on the white grid of the board.
- Wherever there is an input on any row in the white grid it needs to travel along another wire and continue and complete a circuit.
- It looks like the Horizontal and Vertical Black components of the board need to both be plugged in to to make a complete circuit
- Alligator clip order, one way or the other, doesn't matter. the circuit still works.
- We were having trouble because the battery was weak. A new battery fixed everything
- An important experiment might be to measure the precise percentage of expansion for a given length of nitinol so that we can fabricate a system that exploits it. We will probably need to use mechanical advantage to make it show up. That means using the Nitinol as if it were a small gear on a big wheel...like a ten speed.
- we played with PBASIC - a little about debugging and the important command RCTIME which controls the conditional logic of the wire
- the amount of milliseconds used for the looping or IF statements matters. 4000 looks like a good number for the wire to fully expand and contract. But we say quick oscillations with as little as 500. After that we couldn't see it. This is nice because we might be able to control velocity or speed of reaction in a project
- I sketched a fabric membrane idea and Lindsey and I discussed it. A possible experiment based on Proto 01
# posted by Josh Draper : 5:19 PM
