Forgot to put up the pic of the new Ferris wheel assembly

I made some changes to some of the parts and took a picture earlier today but forgot to upload it here.

-Charlie

ITS ALIVE!!!! sort of

For home from work and had a chance to play around with the mic and the neopixel strip :).

Using the code I found for a music reactive bracket and changing some of the values, I kinda got it to work.

It blinks at least.

I even got a video of it sort of reacting to music, the volume is really low, i was probably covering the mic by accident.

-Charlie

Work in progress

Finally got in the parts that I ordered and they are gonna be fun to play with. The neo pixles are cutable to size so I should be able to wire them up how I like. I don't know if there will be enough on a 1M strand but it's a start. The mic from sparkfun and the neopixles should work well once I put in the code that I found for that setup. I might even be able to figure out how to do it with a 3.5mm headphone jack with speakers or something.

I decided to make the wheel out of clear acrylic and make it a bit smaller to accommodate the lower amount of pixels that I got. Oh I made a end cap that will attack to the center axle and then I should be able to drill a hole to put the motor in, I just hope it will be able to turn it. Might be able to use a rubber wheel like some of the smaller ferris wheels do anyway, could help with mounting problems, we'll see.

Gonna be playing with the neopixles this week I hope.

-Charlie

Spacer

     I had the idea that if the LED's are going to look the best, they should probably be on the outside of the wheel.  To prevent the LED strip from hitting the support i made a notched spacer that could go on the notched axle and keep the main body away from the support.  This should allow the LED strip to be placed anywhere and not interfere with the support.

-Charlie

Motion Review

     I needed to make some adjustments to the measurements of the supports and the center axle.  The axle needs to be notched so it can move the main body.  I'm thinking that it might be better to have the dowel be smaller than the support hole, then use a bearing with a notched inner and round outer to make smooth movement.

      Then i wanted to make sure the LED strips would fit on the main body, ADAfruit doesn't give exact dimensions but it does show the strip next to a quarter.  So i measured a quarter with my digital calipers and roughed out a size to put the LED strips on.

     Here's a rough redesigned idea with hopefully the notch visible.

-Charlie

Motion study of the ferris wheel

Last post was really long so I didn't want to add this video to the bottom and have it get lost.  Here is a short clip of a basic motion study of the wheel spinning.

The video looks bad in the blogger page, but the link in the bottom right of the video should bring you directly to the youtube page with the video and that should work fine.

-Charlie

Work being done

So been working a little on the idea of how to build the ferris wheel body that will be doing the spinning.  We have access to MDF, foam core, and some other build materials.

I made a 12"x12" and 1/4" thick base board to look like particle board since the material and apearance wasn't in solid works by default

     Next I made supports to hold the wheel.  Angled for some extra support with a filleted hole for smooth insertion of the axle.

     Next was the biggest pain. Working on the main body showed me how much of a pain solid works can be if you mess up the geometry.  circular patterns of bodies can also be a huge pain.  I first tried to circular pattern the sketch, but then it wasn't fully defined, and i had to do a lot of trimming. Then doing fillets was a huge pain to click on every edge.  Then the rotation did not put the edges matching up that i wanted, and it kind of looked like a bunch of hammers facing the same direction to hit a bunch of nails all at once.

     Funny and frustrating at the same time.  I think it has something to do with what plane you make a center line on and follows the plane axis rather than the one you necessarily want it to.

     Anyway, after fighting with geometry and other silly mistakes, I finally figured out how to make it do what i want.  I added a hole for the main axle and holes for the axles of the "carts" that hold passengers or stuffed animals, or pokemon or whatever.Then added an appearance and filleted holes for smooth insertion of the wooden dowels.

     Next was making some wooden dowels.  1/8" and 1/4".

     Next was putting all the pieces together in an assembly.  Using concentric, coincident, parallel and offset mates, I was able to get the wheels to fit together and not look too bad.

-Charlie

Project Idea

We will be attempting to make an arduino controlled ferris wheel using lazer cut materials.

We want to make the ferrris wheel respond to music, have the motor controlled byt he speed of the music and get some LED's to blink in time with the msuci.  First approch would be to get it to work with a 3.5 mm jack into any audio device.  Second would be to get a microphone to get the wheel to move and lights to blink.

Here is an erector set done with some LED's

Erector set LED feris wheel



-Charlie

Cool video ideas

Here are some links to some really cool projects done with arduino.


LED board responds to music


More LED reactions to music


LED beat box


Arduino POV clock


Arduino Xbee quadcopter




there are tons more and all you really need to do is search youtube for some awesome video's and you can see how many things can be made with arduino.


-Charlie

Group Photo

Here we are, with no idea what we want to build but at least getting to know each other, thanks to Prof. Sullivan for taking the picture :)

Team members :

Jessica

Brittney

Charlie