It began on Day 7, when we were given an assignment: create something that would either reduce wasted energy or water consumption.  The three of us girls paired up naturally, and began talking.  One thing we were all worried about was the amount of water we used when taking showers.  So we thought, "Why not build a device that encourages shorter showers?"  Thus the idea of the shower timer project was conceived.

We began with some calculations to find the impact of our…

Michael and I interviewed a 6 year old boy named Khalil.  He immediate expressed his interest in 2 things: Lightsabers and Dinosaurs.  He first mentioned a lightsaber he really would love to have that had two ends (one red and one blue) and when you pressed a button it would open up. Then he switched gears and brought dinosaurs into it.  He wanted a dinosaur with lightsaber hands, spikes and a chainsaw tongue.

 …

Hey everyone,

This is the blog post that Liam and I are doing for our tic-tac shooter.  It is fully assembled with its rotating stand, light sensors, and motor all mounted and ready for tomorrow.  Its certainly been an interesting project since the original idea did not have tic-tacs as the ammunition.

The story of this tic-tac shooter spans over this week and the previous two weeks of January 2011.  The original plan was to make some sort of shooter that was…

Interview:

We interviewed a 4 year old boy who was really into cars. We asked him to draw his favorite car on a piece of paper. He went through three designs and ended up with a butterfly car, which could fly.He was really into the designs on the car. Instead of hexagons like in the picture below he wanted lines, squares and dots on his car. 

We decided to make a butterfly car, with wings that flapped and was powered by an elastic band…

Today at the lab my group got a lot done!

We accomplished all our goals for the day! We finished our model bathroom...by arranging everything and making sure it all worked then we began testing on our GoGo Board which...thankfully started working again soon after we began the testing!

Next we made a nice shower head so the water would flow like it would on a real shower!

After drilling the holes to the right size after a few tries the water didn't get everything wet, but…

by Ryan A and Arne B

This week were are prototyping a ferris wheel. This idea is from Niki who we interviewed last weekend. She would like to call it “Prepare for Insane” or “Wheel of Wonder” and it should have baskets with human figures and incorporate automatic rotation and blinking lights. If possible it should also be remotely controlled. 

Summary…

Everything's running!  The water pump works, the tub no longer leaks, everything is glued down, our speaker system works perfectly... We are so ready for tomorrow.

This, however, wasn't the case earlier today.  At any given point today, one or more of those statements was false.  The water pump worked, but the pressure was so high that the stream of water ended up missing the tub completely (solution: create a shower head by drilling holes into a random plastic cap you found…

today we finished the casing and begain functionel prototyping 

this is us testing the sensors

this is our case in finalized form…

Summit students (and I suppose eventually Everest students) are known for jumping into things without reading directions first, and are chastised frequently for doing so.  Despite three and a half years of that chastisement, I failed to read the directions on the Gorilla Glue before applying it to our 3D models in the hopes that it would glue them to our bathroom model... Whoops...  No pictures of that, thankfully, but it did take us a bit of time to correct.

SO.  Aside from…

Hey again everyone,

Work is progressing with the tic-tac shooter Liam and I are assembling.  The tic-tac shooter we are building has a notoriously unpredictable firing range, today it fired a couple shots that flew all the way to the ceilings at some of the fastest velocities I have seen it attain.  The tic-tac shooter is also notoriously unpredictable with aim.  This is the wrong shooter if you are looking for a sniping shooter.  Today's problems involved shooting aim,…

Here is my delayed post about my nameplate creation!  I started the project out by doing some online research to decide which artist would be the inspiration for the name plate.  Originally I considered doing Art Deco and basing the project off of the Chrysler Building:

After a few more…

This is a blog post about my project.  There is a huge amount of work left:

+Finish programming

+Redo laser casing

+Solder apart lasers, removing buttons

+Print laser casings

+Print sensor casings

+Print GoGo casing

+Solder sensor wires

+Re-finish programming, after it stops working inexplicably

+Retype programming after it is deleted by person or persons unkown

+Regain my sanity

So much…