Blueprinting

silicon gel

Yip Wan Ting Blueprinting, Making 0 Comment

Today was a mix of 3D printing, coding, and finally a family get-together figuring out how silicon gel works. 

Who knew you needed a gun to extract the gel out? and that you needed 3 people? or at least, we were all helping out at some point until we realised we were redundant… I guess that is how efficiency comes about. 

Above is the end result of Anita leathering a healthy amount of silicon onto the piece… and below, a snapshot of us at work.

In other news, we have also successfully installed the pumps onto the holders! 

In the words of Tony, 

“Work smart not hard.”

Also Tony: “Please clean the pipes they’re so dirty.” For the longest time we thought he was joking until he actually passed us the alcohol spray… 

With that; here are some more B-roll of 3D printing — no matter how ‘lame’ the design is, I always get excited when our print is being made… I think I speak for the rest of the team when I say its mesmerizing to watch how something digital can become physical and tangible with a spool and nozzle… squirting out an intricate pattern layer by layer… into the thing we need.  

software inferface

Yip Wan Ting Blueprinting, Coding, Making, Raspberry Pi, Tinkering 0 Comment

After a long and arduous hours at the MnT lab and consulting the mentors tirelessly, the boys have finally emerged… well, the first battle is won. 

this is what we plan for the interface to look like. But of course, its taking a lot of willpower and brainpower — thank you guys — to get past the steep learning curve of figuring out codes and how to code… 

updates on software side:
—adjustable water pump power
—added an accelerator, halfway through
—VPN concept for remote network control

—Justin helped and guided us for VPN
—we managed to pass a value from frontend to backend, and connected the pumps to the slider dynamically
—we made the website nicer (with a new font, and a full background)

Definitely not an easy feat, and as the team member working on the hardware side its mad respect to watch them sit themselves down and determined to finish what they set out to do at the start of the day! 

In other news, its time to get more pumps and mosfet channels… 

the learning experience

Yip Wan Ting Blueprinting, Brainstroming, Making, Uncategorized 0 Comment

We were too idealistic with the print, and it came out with too many gaps such that it wouldnt hold the pipes tightly. We were then stuck with either adding amendments, or redo the entire print. 

it felt like a waste, especially having troubled Tony and the team to power up the large printer for us. But Tony kindly said otherwise, that it was a learning experience! #positivethinking 

 

and so with that we got to work on a new design

but first, a quick test of the various dimensions that could fit — something we didn’t want to do initially, but realized the importance of doing so. We thought this step could be omitted because its a waste of materials, and takes time in itself to print — but we learnt the hard way that there is greater wastage when the dimensions are imprecise… 

 

daily pilgrimage

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Fridays are the days where most groups are taking a break

but because our group takes turns to take a break on different days, we pretty much came everyday… 

With the arrival of the solar panels, we went to test it out in the open, and it worked surprisingly well, generating a voltage of 14.4V even under a cloudy sky. 

The next problem was how to attach it to the existing frame. 

After some thought and consideration, we changed the orientation from flat right on top of the boat to a roof-like structure. This will prevent it from collecting water at the top, allow drainage if it were to rain.

Taking inspiration to make the boat more modular so that assembly will be easier,  we came up with another grand plan. 

Now what is left is to make the frames to hold the pipes; which will involve 3D printing and the dreaded use of Fusion 360 once more…

Things to do: (by priority)
- 3D print for the 4inch pipe
- 3D print for the hole in the polycarbonate 
- 3D print for 2inch to the alumnium profile

aim is to print all by tmr (or at least by the cmg wk) so we can secure all of them on weds

re-calculating…

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Back to the drawing board it was. 

 

Tony told us that we could continue using the materials we procured, so it was time to figure out how much of pipe we could cut. One of the seniors offering to help out kindly did some calculations with us, and the original copy of his workings can be found here: Marine Surveillance (MnT).

He also calculated the amount of weight the PVC pipe could support and plotted a graph, which, long story short — means we could use 1m long pipes to support 4kg worth of weight. 

Here’s some footage of us (starring Jing Rui) attempting to understand the workings… 

the next step was to cut it! 

to be continued

the Destroyer from the Navy

Yip Wan Ting Blueprinting 0 Comment

#militarygrade

After a lot more googling, we found that most boats have a pointed front, with propellers underneath. And that was a simple but functional design that was very suited to what we need it to do! 

 

As for movement, we remained undecided and figured we could do with either paddles or water jets. Under the advice of Tony, we went with water jets, controlled with the Raspberry Pi. The design was to have 4 jets, one in each direction of NSEW, so that we could have easier control of direction.

We had 2 ideas, and trying to minimise materials and cost, we went with the second design (bottom)

Finally knowing the outlook of the boat and the materials we would need, it was time to start sourcing for these items! 

Due to the pandemic, shopping together was not advisable and online shopping was a new skill for most of us. The pandemic also caused a delay in shipping, and the items took a while to arrive. Thankfully, our finance manager Jing Rui was able to get everything we needed in time and soon enough, we could start assembling our items! Of course, that settled the issue of procuring hardware, our next challenge was to figure out how the hardware would create the software…  

 

the hamster ball

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First seen on a computer screen in the MnT lab, we were inspired by the ‘Rolling Ball’ designed by SUTD; the concept of movement by this land rover similar to the fictitious BB-8 character in Star Wars.  

and with that, we decided we could model it and do the same thing with our boat! 

We met in a room and discussed for a good 3hours, sitting round a computer and throwing out our best ideas; how it would move in the water, the placement of pedals, the change in direction, the mechanism of how the pedals will move…

and after presenting our ideas to Dr Ho and Tony, we were met with another wave of hard hit realization: boats do not tend to be circular, for the very reason of the need to break symmetry for easier movement and direction control.

its probably not what we googled, but we concluded it was probably an engineering and design thing, since most boats — or infact, rarely any boats are circular. Most boats are streamlined, with a sharp front to slice through the water.

I guess that was the first thing we learnt. While our boat will not be as original, it will at least be functional. Thinking we could be creative with the boat design meant we forgo years of boat engineering that has refined the shape of boats today. While out of the box ideas were innovative and interesting concepts, it neglected a lot of engineering considerations — and for us, it was back to the drawing board again. 

researching

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#gettingexcited 

After finally settling on a project on making a boat that looks like a fish, we were told to get down to the mechanics. The process of brainstorming has left us confused as to whether we were tackling our project correctly — do we start with what we wanted to create, or a problem we wanted to solve? Should we think about our limitations, or should we dream big then scale down?  Frustrated and at a loss, we looked to Dr Ho and Tony, who once again provided us with words of wisdom from a wealth of experience: “you’ll never start at the right place, you just have to start somewhere.” With that; presenting to you our final block diagram, which is probably the 10th refinement. But really, who is counting? 

[Poor resolution there, for a better quality visit our Google Slides document. ]

After mapping out what we knew we needed, it was time to source for the components and figure out the hardware, and how the software was supposed to work with the hardware — not to mention how the software was supposed to work. 

All these considerations were an overwhelming lot, so the following blogs is an attempt to breakdown everything that was happening at once!