W8

This is the link to our notion page discussing how we complete the in-class assignment as well as the final project’s concept and some of the experiments that we have conducted on its mechanism structure. In this post, I will mainly focus on my learning experience.

I think the biggest takeaway, for me, from this rapid mechanism prototyping is how we could turn a rotation movement into a verticle one. The tail seems to be a simple structure when I try to envision what it looks like in my mind. But when it moves to the production stage, it’s correlated with so many things like material choice, motor types, and how to hold all these things. As I repetitively experiment with the material, eventually the combination of wire rope and the rubber tube provides both the ideal rigidity and the toughness required for bending. And during this process, I gradually learn more about the correlation between rigidity and how the material performs under other forces trying to pull it apart. As for the motor type, for now, I am using the stepper motor as it provides the most control over the angle we are trying to rotate. But it has its own weakness, which is that if we have to pull four strings separately, it would just be too heavy to wear these motors. So correspondingly, we are trying to figure out a belt structure to hold it and also regard it as part of our design by using some covers to hide it. I don’t think the servo provides only 180 degrees and the motor only controls the clockwise and counter-clockwise will be enough to control the tail to move in the ideal direction. We also want to integrate the supporting structure as part of our outfit design. Currently, we are trying to suspenders and belts to balance all the weight to the whole body rather than leave them all on the butt part, which really pushes us into the position of thinking of the outfit more as something covering the whole body.