Phew, what a week.  After bouncing back from GDC, we came into our project room, and it was like christmas morning!  So many packages!  We had a great time opening them and checking all of the pieces we ordered, which took quite some time!  After everything was opened and ready to go, all that was left was starting to put stuff together.

First I worked on the servo mount for the mirrors to make sure it all worked and the pieces fit together properly, and guess what, it worked! Now that we had our test piece done and it worked with the servo, I worked on building the rest of them.  The good news is that the servo mounts will control the mirrors quite nicely, and they’re super easy and fast to put together!

We also set up an oder of 8020, which will be the support structure for the Mirror housing.  It was really fun to design and luckily a few of our fellow students will be helping us out with cutting and securing the exterior materials.

The big step for Jars was putting all the components on the PCBs, and Jason got started on that right away.  One big challenge with the PCBs was also figuring out how to mount them inside the jars, and Elwin got to work designing a core that would hold them, as well as the LEDs.  In the meantime before we got an actual prototype, we used a toilet paper roll to determine what materials we wanted to use to diffuse the light.  We decided on a Polyfill, which is generally used to stuff plush toys, but for us gives a great cloud-like effect in our jars!  We were really excited that Lasermouse, another project team, let us use their laser cutter to prototype the cores.  After troubleshooting a few things, Elwin figured it out and we have some options for cores that would work inside the jar.

We’ve gotten a ton done this week and we’re looking forward to keeping up the work, and updating you all with our progress!