For this week we needed to create a machine to test outputs as our group assigment.
Our first approach was to create a brainstorm and codesign together some rough ideas for what we wanted to achieve, having as main pillars; something easy to do, with material that we have in the lab and divide the tasks depending on each potential skills.

I help from the distance and once I arrived in the lab with the help of my collegues set up the tube over the wooden base, elevate it by some 3d pieces, attatch the motor to the wood, and make some test using the valve air with arduino in order to check the general function with the noises created by the flowers.

Motor

Our machine consisted in three simple parts for creating the code: Pressing a button, turning the stepper motor and activating the solenoid valve.
The stepper motor its a electromechanical device that converts electrical pulses into precise mechanical motion. This means that it moves one step at a time corresponding to a fixed angle of rotation. (In the inside of the motor there are teeths that interact with kind of a turbine to move.) Something to understand is that The sequence of pulses determines the spinning direction of the motor, the frequency of the pulses determines the speed of the motor and the number of pulses determines how far the motor will turn.
So, we connected the motor to an A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Chip, this is a microstepping driver, so we had to connect it to our NEMA 17 motor for a bipolar (single winding per phase). Then we connected to the pinouts of the driver to control power pins, input and output pins.
After that, I filmed it in order to create an explanatory video, so I used chatgpt to help me create a script to show how they builted the machine, what components where created and how the machine worked. Laslty, for the voice I used murf.ai to create a narration with english accent. Here is the results

To understand the code, which I had the arduino file but didn't understand it, my friend chatgpt help me to translate into actions and explain me why they choose the motor, the elements on the board and the need of valve air.

Things to learn




• 01 skiping a week kills the documentation process
• 02 chatgpt can be an useful help for code
• 03 Simply, is always better, then go for more complexity