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Outcome

To finish our machine on schedule, we started planning and doing some preparation work in the weeks prior to the machine week. That helped us to get a better understanding of the different tasks we needed to complete and to have all components available.

We met all together for four long days in Fab Lab Ísafjörður, but continued working individually or in smaller groups on certains aspects of the machine and presentation afterwards.

We achieved our goal of building a 3D landscape model with a simulated, realistic sun path.

Presentation

Machine Week presentation slides

Challenges

We faced several challenges while working on this machine, but the most severe was the microcontroller and debugging of the PCB and program.

We encountered major issues with the SAMD21 not being able to communicate with the screen via I2C and because no logic analyzer was available, the debugging was almost impossible.

These issues did consume a lot of valuable time and resulted in exchanging the microcontroller, without being able to solve the issue.

Other minor issues we encountered, were related to the electric circuit using power regulators and mosfets in an unappropriate way and we were able to solve that.

Future improvements

There are some details of this machine that leave room for improvement.

  • It would be nice to use stepper motors with more steps. The ones we used produce a rough movement of the axes involving shaking and noise.
  • The cable routing leaves room for improvement. It would be nice to integrate the cable for the light inside the arm and add channels for the wires inside the machine.
  • The functionality of the HMI could be extended, by adding the option to run the model constantly with an adjustable speed. That way, one could observe the solar path over a whole day, within minutes.
  • Another idea for extending the functionality is to make the landscape model interchangeable for showcasing different locations. The latitude, longitude, UTC offset and other information could be programmed to a chip (RFID?) in each model.

Acknowledgements

Our instructors

In the image below you can see how glad our instructors in Fab Lab Ísafjörður, Þórarinn Bjartur Breiðfjörð and Svavar Konráðsson, are that we got to realize our machine. We are just as happy with them as our instructors!

Svavar and Doddi

We would like to thank Fab Lab Ísafjörður for hosting us and our instructors for their support prior and during the machine week.

Þórarinn Bjartur Breiðfjörð was with us the first two days in Fab Lab Ísafjörður and Svavar Konráðsson was with us all those days when we were working on the project and their working hours were long. They were ready to assist whenever we needed support in debugging and searching for possible solutions. Their enthusiasm, patience and good humour was very supportive for us.

Frosti Gíslason is Bjartur's instructor. He could not be with us these days but we know that he would have been ready to assist at any time.

The team at work

The team focusing on the project

Here you can see the team working together on the machine design.

Images of the machine