Final Project #3

Coming into the week

This weeks progress has made our project of a clock for toddlers more and more tangible. We worked on the coding for the LEDs, potentiometers, buttons, etc and creating the face of the clock and arm on solid works.

During out presentation to the Professor Gleason, she seemed to like our prototype and the alterations we had made. Her requests were to check with the Child Study Center to see how big of a range of time an age group wanted and what their activity pictures were.

The physical project for this week

Each of the little divots in the  drawing are to stick the end of the LED strip through as to hide the wires behind the face. After completing this long and tedious process, I cut the part out of plywood. We had to sand the edges of the hole where the servo goes because it was a little too tight to press fit comfortably.

I also created the smaller arrow that will rotate in the middle of the structure like a clock hand on solid works and then out of wood. We decided we would drill a whole into the arrow where it would be screwed into the servo rather than cut it in solidworks.

Julia and I cut the LED strips to the proper length to surround the squares and create the arrows. Then we began cutting and stripping wires and soldering them to the LEDS strips. After this, we fed the wires through the divots and glued the LEDs down to the board. Then we started soldering the edges of the mini wires together. However, we ran into a problem here, a lot of the soldering wouldn’t hold up and he wires would snap off of the lights, meaning we’ll have to redo them next week.

The coding and demo for this week 

Weeks Overview

Overall, we got a lot done this week but there is still so much more to be done. We should’ve figured out a more efficient way to solder all of the LEDs together because they’re proving to be very fragile and prone to break. Next week, we have to finish our soldering of LEDs, and connect all of the wires to the Arduino.