Overview

A vined and flowery archway of five whimsical blooming flowers that turn to follow a person walking through the archway with minimal wires and hardware exposed.

Physical placement of components sans wires

Team Learning Goals

One of the earliest ideas that our team decided on was what we wanted to do as a whole. We knocked it down to about 3 points:

  • Shallow graves
  • Aesthetically pleasing
  • Functional, semi-pointless

This allowed us to make decisions throughout our project based on predetermined guidelines. Most of us wanted the chance to make something that was "beautiful" in addition to being functional, but not go overboard with it. Ultimately, we chose to make our project pretty, functional, and polished in favor of something impossible and outright technically challenging.

Individual Learning Goals

Our individual learning goals were also decided early on, and stayed the same throughout each sprint. These ideas helped us delegate based on want, not just ability. It also allowed us to match members to projects with someone who could help them better understand the task at hand.

  • Remy: Designing mechanical systems that work very well with electrical and firmware components, and learning to do website documentation.
  • Louise: I wanna learn how to tell microcontrollers to do things.
  • Ana: I want to get better at writing good code, and also designing things. #freeagent
  • Meaghen: Make cool things that look very pretty, not solely functional.
  • Vivien: Design circuits that work in context with mechanical and firmware systems. Learn how mechanical and firmware systems work.

Mechanical

A garden archway with 5 blooming flowers. Designed by the incredible Ana, the modular arch stands over 7 feet tall for our abnormally tall population.

Electrical

Consisting of ten (10) servos, five (5) VL53L0X time-of-flight sensors, two (2) protoboards, one (1) Arduino Uno, one (1) desktop power supply, and approximately one (1) whole pound of wire, the electrical system will truly shock any reasonable person.

firmware

The brain of our project is an Arduino Uno that connects to 5 VL53L0X time-of-flight sensors and 10 servos that turn and bloom the flowers. Check out our more detailed susbsystem page or our GitHub.