Week 1: Project Management
Originally our team of Eileen Walsh, Matt Pearson, and myself planned on doing a final project involving a portable shower system, that could be constructed onto a trailer and then taken to places where people didnt have access to clean private showers and bring an almost spa-like experience to an urban environment. The recollected water was going to be cycled through a hydroponics systems wrapping along the outside walls of the shower.
Unfortunately, as a group we felt that the collaborative build time needed to construct something of this scale in the time frame we had was nearly impossible. So we scrapped our idea.
So afterwards, I brainstormed on what else I could try to construct as a final project. My cousin just recently opened up a Shoe Boutique dealing in rare and collectible athletic sneakers. One of the cleaning services that they provide is a sole clearing process in which a solution is applied and working with sunlight, the chemicals react and clear the yellowing of the soles and reverse the natural oxidation process.
Two problems arise with the current method in the process, 1. Its not always sunny outside and 2. if you leave the shoes in the sun too long the soles can become damaged from the heat and cause the glue to loose its adhesivness, resulting in the sole seperating from the shoe itself.
So taking inspiration from this process, my idea is to build a "Solar Box" in which they could treat shoes at their own convience instead of waiting on mother nature to provide a sunny day. It would have a Reflective material wrapped along the interior of the box. on all four sides there will be a array of fans to provide cooling. the shoes would sit on a clear acyrlic piece, and below the acrylic UV lights would be pointing upwards illuminating the entire surface of the box similar to copy machine.
Some of the features I would like to be included are:
-Tempature Control/Display
-Lighting Control
-Timer Display
-Fan Speed Control
I would like to integrate the systems to function all together. Be able to set a max tempature level, and once that level is reached either the lighting is automatically dimmed to adjust or the fan speed is increased to promote cooling. Also a timer that counts down and counts up so you can use it to keep track of how long a specific shoe has been treated for.
Update: Current Final Project
Assignment: build a personal site in the class archive describing you and your final project
Previously I have only had experience with uploading content onto websites via blogs (i.e. wordpress) but never built a website from stratch before. So being unfamiliar I didnt quite know where to start. I ended up going with the Adobe product Dreamweaver mainly due to the fact that I already had Adobe Illustrator and was comfortable with that program. After watching a tutorial on Adobe's website I was able to get the basic feel for the functions and the various steps needed to design the page to my liking. So now that I have a website, I can upload my class assignments and document my experience.
Mercurial is the tool being used to pull, and push data onto the student archive. Unfortunately from the beginning I was having issues with getting Mercurial to work. I tried following several tutorials including AS220's, and spending time with my remote instructor trying trying to troubleshoot but was unsuccessful. I Luckily I was able to get some help when TIES and Fab Foundation came to Richmond to help set up a temporary electronics workbench. It took several hours of troubleshooting but finally they were able to help me get Mercurial to work.
