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mechanical design...

There are a few things to decide before moving into the final project. For this assignment I will look into detail the construction and way things fit together.

First of all, there needs to be a decision about the actual pole structure. How does it stand? Does it hang from the ceiling/ beams somehow? Does it need to be placed into the ground? Here are a few ideas/ solutions.

I chose to go with option E and therefore need to find a way for the pole to be free standing. This means that because it is a 2400mm height it will need to have a large enough footprint and be heavy enough to be stable.



After some thought I decided there was no solution other than buying a central hollow pole around which all the disks would be placed. The idea of the hollow pole is that if in the future I make a bluetooth fabduino all is good. If not I will need to have wire coming down from the top disk where I will place the fabduino. The wire will be the FTDI one goind to the computer. It could also be an ethernet one as it is cheaper but this particular project doesn not involve the fabrication of such board.


The pole is divided into 4 sections in order to make logistics easier. Section A, B, C and D, have all got the same heignt of 576mm which is 32 x 18mm disks per section. Adding another 5 disks the total heignt is of 2394mm which is what I need.

Here is a list of parts needed for the interaction and the way parts are put together.

The 4 accelerometers will be each one in each fabric ribbon, connected to the fabduino by a ribbon cable that will end up in a screw terminal. Each accelerometer has 5 pins each = 5 cables needed.

Finally, the disk design can be found in this drawing.

This design can also be found here.