17. Machine design

This week I worked on defining my final project idea and started to getting used to the documentation process.

Running an individual node

We were all hundreds of miles away from one another. Most of us thought the project would be impossible. It was, for a long part of it. Luckily, my part was all physical labour so I didn’t have to rely much on the others. I was the first stepping stone to how we would run our machine!

Thoughts on the Group Page

So, while completing FabAcademy, we did assign someone with the task of writing up the group page ( as in we would give them our writing and failures for them to format and polish up), but it had to been done by another person in the end. This has lead me to believe that these individual nodes are damaging to the FabAcademy experience, but better for a real world experience. Sadly, lot of files go missing nearly all the time. Some people don’t hold up on their end of the bargain and most definetly don’t meet every requirement given. I don’t, my partners might not, but I got to learn how to bounce back if those things were happening (even if I wasn’t necessarily the one taking all the blowback).

My Individual Contribution

My individual contribution was making the keys for our music machine. I bought long copper bars and cut them to size by comparing them to some of the different xylophones at my school. I then grinded them down to a better tone after using an app that would help me with discerning pitch called Tuner Pro. I kept grinding down the keys until I got the pitch I wanted from each one.