Final Project Proposal

For my final project, I want to make something that reflects most of the concepts I learn in Fablab academy. At the same time it should be something useful and fairly simple enough to be completed within the time limit. Below I have listed two proposals I have in mind for now.

Window Cleaner
My first proposal is to make a simple tool that would simplify cleaning of glass windows. A sketch of the proposed tool is shown below. It has a cleaning head and a handle just like a car window cleaner, but in this case the up and down movement of the cleaning head is automated using motors.

The cleaner uses two bars to create the up and down movement. One bar is attached to the handle and another is attached to the cleaning head. The cleaning head bar slides up and down inside the handle bar with help of stepper motors and rollers. Limit switches attached to the head will be used to detect edges of windows.

Persistence of Vision (POV) Display
The other proposal is to make an LED display that uses the concept of persistence of vision to display texts and images. It uses far more less LEDs than ordinary LED matrix displays. The proposed display would consist of a column of several LEDs (50-100) placed on a DC motor. As the motor rotates it creates the illusion that we have a circular display with much more LEDs. A microcontroller controls the speed of the motor with feedback from sensors and blinks each LED on and off to create the required image or text. Computer software will be used to create a bitmap to the microcontroller and transfer the bitmap through a wireless link.