Today we spent our time constructing a one panel mockup of our umbrella to test the required torque to pull in the arms and to test the overall soundness of our design.
First, we started with the center piece that holds all of the arms. Our first design was made of many pieces glued together (one for each arm) and we realized this was dumb. Why not just make one piece with 6 holes? 2 hours of work later this second idea took us very little time to construct and was much stronger.
Second, we cut the arms to length (23.5 inches) then attached Teflon floss (slippery!) from the center pole to the arms. We learned that the when the floss was attached to the pole making a straight line to the bent arm, the amount of force needed to pull the floss was less than if it were tied higher on the pole.
Next, we created a template for the covering of the umbrella.
Our next step is to finish the fabric covering and attach the sensors. We have begun to figure out the code to drive the motor but that will become our main focus soon.
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