Geoffrey

"The important thing is not to stop questioning." - Albert Einstein

Category: Design

Grade 9 Engineering Project Reflect & Share

March 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

For Grade 9 Science & Engineering’s Engineering project, we were asked to design a product which demonstrates the transfer of energy. My product is a rubber-band powered paper airplane launcher. Here’s an image of the final product:

The product ended up not functioning correctly as the friction caused by the rubber bands rubbing against the sides stopped the airplane from launching.

Here are some additional questions that I will ask myself to reflect on this project.

 

What transfer of energy is shown in this product?

This product receives the kinetic energy of an arm pulling back the launch capsule, and converts that to elastic potential energy. When a finger pulls the trigger using kinetic energy, the elastic potential energy is converted into kinetic energy and would launch the plane forwards, with a small portion being converted to waste energy types like thermal and sound.

 

What would I do differently if I could do this project again?

If I could do this project again, I would plan in 3 dimensions. This product would have worked if thickness wasn’t a factor, but things like hot glue and the difference in cardboard and wood thicknesses made the product fail. Something else I would do differently is to spend less time on Define & Inquire. I spent more than enough time not doing anything and just thinking about whether my ideas are good enough to move to Develop & Plan, which forced me to later spend my first Create & Improve lesson on planning.

 

What do I think I did well?

I think I did many things well in this project, despite the final product not working. I feel like my plan was a good plan, since it is detailed and includes several features which improved the product, such as the aim assist and the trigger mechanism. I also think that I used Affinity Designer rather well, since I never used Affinity before this project. I got a decent grasp on the application rather quickly.

Grade 9 Engineering Project Create & Improve

March 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

In Grade 9 Science & Engineering’s Engineering Project, we were tasked with designing and creating a device that involves energy transfer. This is the process I went through to create my Grade 9 Engineering Project’s final product, the Rubber-band Powered Paper Airplane Launcher.

 

 

Day 1: (2023/2/17)

I spent this day mostly planning since I was somewhat behind with my plans. I created a paper airplane and caulculated the dimensions of a perfectly-made paper airplane, so that I can create a product which is suited to launching paper airplanes.

Day 2: (2023/2/21)

On Day 2, I started creating my product. I cut cardboard and created the portion of my product which will hold and launch the paper airplane (what I call the “Launch Capsule”). I used brass fasteners to hold 3 layers of cardboard together. It fit my paper airplane rather well.

Day 3: (2023/2/23)

On Day 3, using Affinity Designer, I created designs for the rest of the components, and used that file to lasercut wood that is 1.5mm thick. This would have gotten me the remaining components I need for my project, but there was an error in the lasercutting instructions and some parts were cut incorrectly.

I also found the axle I will use to secure the trigger mechanism.

Day 4: (2023/2/27)

I noticed that the trigger mechanism does not fit a hand well and is rather awkward to use. Because of this, on Day 4, I redesigned my parts using Affinity Designer, making the handle further from the trigger and also making it longer. Here is a comparison of the starting and updated designs:

Updated handle design:

After that, I noticed that the trigger handle was too far away and that users would have to stretch their hands in an uncomfortable manner, so I moved the handle closer to the trigger, like this:

Day 5: (2023/3/1)

On Day 5, I focused on putting the components together using hot glue. One issue I noticed was that the launch capsule would not fit in the trigger mechanism, but I resolved that by lasercutting more trigger mechanisms and gluing them to the side to make more space.

However, this was not enough. I needed more room for the launch capsule, as the rubber bands on the sides caused extra friction which prevented the launch capsule from launching. This made the product completely unusable. There wasn’t enough time to disassemble and reassemble with more components, however, so my final product did not work as well as I intended for it to.

Grade 9 Engineering Project Define & Inquire

February 19, 2023 / / 0 Comments

In Science & Engineering’s G9 Engineering Project, we were tasked with designing and creating a device that involves energy transfer.

Purpose: Demonstrate the transfer of energy, and also entertain.

The G9 Engineering Project specifies that this project is meant to show energy transfer, so that is the main goal of this project. Furthermore, I would like for my device to be entertaining or at least interesting since it would be completely pointless otherwise.

Audience: People who would like to be entertained and / or learn about energy transfer.

Project Constraints:

  • A time limit of two weeks for building. This will limit how complex my device can be.
  • Limited materials. This will make some ideas impossible, and other ideas not fully implementable.
  • My lack of skills. This will affect the quality of my product, and also make some ideas off-limits to me.

 

Here are my 3 initial design ideas:

Idea 1: Wooden Marble Track

Materials:

  • Wood, because it is the most accessible material at the ISB Design Center. It is also rather durable.
  • 3D printing material if possible, because it would save the time of cutting and help with precision. However, I don’t have much experience with 3D printing.

Pros:

  • Is not overly complicated / intricate.
  • Is rather interesting.
  • Not dangerous at all.

Cons:

  • Requires materials to come in blocks instead of planks, which is what the Design Center offers.
  • Woodcutting might be time-consuming, and therefore it might not be possible to make a long marble track.

Idea 2: Rube Goldberg Machine

Materials:

  • Depends on the machine. Will require lots of different materials though.

Pros:

  • Is not too complicated to set up.
  • Is interesting.
  • The final product is not very dangerous.

Cons:

  • Testing will take a lot of time.
  • Requires a lot of planning.
  • Requires precise measurements.
  • Is very fragile: one accidental / failed activation and the entire project will have to be reset.
  • Could be difficult to design.

Idea 3: Rubber-band-powered Paper Airplane Launcher

Materials:

  • Paper for the paper airplane.
  • Rubber band(s).
  • Cardboard
  • Wood

Pros:

  • Fun.
  • Not very dangerous.

Cons:

  • There aren’t a lot of improvements to be made after the basic product is finished, so if I finish early I will have nothing to do.

 

In the end, I decided to develop the paper airplane launcher. The wooden marble track simply requires too much time, and the Rube Goldberg machine requires too much planning.

Circuits Final Summative Assessment Blog Post

June 17, 2021 / / 0 Comments

For the final Circuits summative, I made a game. Here’s my process of creating the project and my reflection on the summative.

Planning

The Outputs and Inputs: I used five LEDs in my plan: two sequence LEDs (both green) and three status LEDs (yellow, red, and green). The inputs are the A and B buttons.

The Code: Nothing happens until the player starts the game by pressing A and B at the same time. The game would randomly generate a sequence of left and rights (represented with 0s and 1s in the code), and then display the sequence with the two sequence LEDs. The A and B buttons will have to be pressed in the right order for the player to win. If the player wins, the green status LED lights up, and otherwise the red LED lights up.

The Circuit: The left sequence light would be connected to port A4 of the CPX, and the right sequence will be connected to A3. The three status LEDs (yellow, red, and green) would be connected to A5, A6, and A7 in order.

Here’s an image of my plan:

Changes to the Plan

I removed the status LEDs from the plan. This is because the status LEDs are not very important: they don’t add much to the general project, despite requiring three LEDs to be sewn, which I thought was a waste of time when considering what it does for the project. My project stayed true to the plan otherwise though.

Making the Project

The majority of the project was spent on coding and debugging, due to the more complex code needed to make the project. There was a problem: MakeCode did not have wait until condition and repeat until condition blocks, which is what the concept was based on. I had to create a workaround with on event and wait until event blocks that was very delicate: the code would probably break if one block activated half a second slower. It took a while to get the timing right (there was weird reactivations of scripts, and other details that took a while to fix).  After that, the rest of the time was spent on sewing the two sequence LEDs in place. Here are some images of the process:

First LED Sewn

           

Second LED Sewn

The Final Product & My Reflection

Front side of the final product.

Back side of the final product (the stitches and sewing is shown here).

My final product looks rather bland: it does not have any decorative stitches or pieces of felt. I thought about adding letters in felt that says “DEFUSE” below the CPX, a guide to the game on paper pinned to the project, and a lighted string on the CPX to make it look like a bomb, but there wasn’t enough time. In other words, if I had more time, I would add on to the the visual aspect of the project.

In this project, I learned how to sew and make circuits with the CPX (the concept of a common end for multiple separate circuits confused me a bit at first). I also learned how to use the CPX in general. In the future, I think I probably would not be doing much with CPXes, but if I did, I would probably make some more code-focused projects.

Circuits: First Project for Sewable Circuits

May 6, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Share Your Product:

This project is a Minecraft creeper bookmark. I chose the creeper design because I like Minecraft (it’s one of my favorite games). I am proud of this bookmark, because it’s the first e-textile circuit I made that ever worked. The other designs (An Among Us Crewmate & a planet) were not chosen. That is because they were more complicated, with more measurements. Both also had round edges, which is harder to cut out compared to sharp edges.

This is my process of creating the bookmark (with images):

1. Develop and plan
For this stage, I designed the ideas and created the prototype after one plan was approved.

Here are some photos of my prototype:


2. Create and improve:

In this stage, I created the bookmark itself.

Here are some photos of the bookmark:

Share Your Learning:
I learned a lot while working on this project. I learned the reason for my previous practice circuits to not work: I used one thread throughout the entire circuit. I used one thread for the positive path and one for the negative this time, and it worked. I also realized that I need to use normal thread to tie the other 2 tabs. That ways, the battery holder doesn’t flop around or fall off. For me, the first tab was really hard to tie the thread on to, because the battery holder was not already secure. I managed to do it after after a while though. Another thing that was really hard was the planning process. I spent too much time drawing the scale drawings, which ate away one class that was meant for creating the prototype. Here are my plans:This is the plan for the Creeper bookmark. It was approved.
This is a plan for a planet pin.
This is a plan for an Among Us Crewmate.

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