Our Progress

Here you can see all the progress we’ve made, as well as what’s to come!
This page will be updated periodically, but if you want the most up-to-date version, please check out our Trello.

Here’s what we’ve done so far:

Our blog is more in-depth source of this information!

  • Post to the website each week
    • We’ve done a post on every Friday since the 7th of November.
    • Each post has a comprehensive breakdown of all our progress that week.
  • Made a Trello to organize our ideas.
    • Our Trello is kept up-to-date in real time, and is public.
    • Contains completed tasks, and WIP tasks.
  • Picked-up/Purchased additional parts
    • Bought screws and plywood from The Home Depot.
  • Designed our plans for laser-cutting
    • We mapped out the correct measurements on each piece to ensure precision.
  • Laser-cut our parts
    • We went down to Mount Holyoke and cut our parts.
    • Our completed pieces have been assembled into our current product.
  • Fitted the Hall-Effect Sensor
    • Current main source of RPM calculation.
    • Magnets on fan blades work with sensor at base.
  • Worked with our LEDs
    • Soldered the LEDs together.
    • Affixed the LEDs to the fan blades.
  • Wrote foundational code
    • We wrote code for the basic functionality of the display.
    • RPM modulation has been integrated.
  • Hard-Coding letters
    • We’ve decided to hard-code the letters, in order to make more creative demos.
  • Weather Display
    • A weather demo that pulls from a weather database to show the current weather, temperature (as well as a small graphic).
  • Music Visualizer
    • We want to make a demo of a music visualizer, one that shows a small animation involving the amplitude, overall loudness, and frequency of a song playing.
  • Clock & Stopwatch
    • We created both an analog and digital clock.
    • We created a stopwatch that can be played/paused, reset, and displayed as an analog or digital stopwatch.
  • Text Visualizer
    • A small program that allows you to set the color of, and display any text.
    • The text marquees around the display.
  • MacOS Companion App
    • We created a MacOS app that interfaces with the AuroraFan so that we can show off all our cool demos!
    • Integrates iTunes music for the Music Visualizer!

Roadblocks

Although there is so much done, there’s still much to do, and we’ve faced our fair share of roadblocks:

  1. We’ve had to restart how we’re working with RPM several times:
    We’ve gone from trying to maintain a consistent RPM using a MOSFET to using a Hall-Effect sensor to track RPM to LDRs and have even considered using IR receivers and transmitters to keep track of RPM in real time.
  2. We had many problems with laser cutting:
    We used a different software for creating our pieces for laser cutting and exported as an svg… Only to find out that the laser cutter isn’t compatible with svg, unlike most major laser-cutting brands. Suffice to say, we spent many hours amending this issue (costing us both time and money for the rental car!).
  3. Physically limiting hardware:
    The slip ring we have has constant electric noise at well below its rated RPM (not to mention it isn’t the best slip ring we could be using, a through bore slip ring would be better, but it’s much more expensive),
    the motor doesn’t spin at a constant RPM, the neopixel website lists the measurements for the neopixel strips we ordered incorrectly (leading to faulty measurements on our fan blades), we ordered a new slip ring and it arrived broken, and our overall image quality and frame-rate has been severely limited from our original plan, due to the combination of all above issues. Overall, we’ve had the most limitations due to the hardware, but such is the nature of building a product like ours from scratch.

Lessons Learned & Tips

Despite our struggles, this has still been a learning experience for us both:

  1. Soldering
    Personally I’ve spent a lot of time soldering pieces for this project, and i’ve learned some pretty good techniques for quick and efficient soldering!
    For example, bridging solder across two horizontal pads can be achieved using a small piece of wire and some steady hands!
  2. Cartesian to polar conversion
    Although cartesian to polar conversion is something we’ve both learned in previous classes, actually implementing it in a real-life scenario is something quite different! We were surprised to find how much more it made sense in practice! Applying an idea is one of the best ways to reinforce it in one’s mind, so using polar for our calculations has both made our algorithms easier to code-up, and has served as quite the learning experience as well!
  3. Working with ESP32
    Working with ESP32 has been quite the experience! It’s interesting how much one can do with such a small piece of hardware, but it seems that the sky’s the limit! Although we’ve run into a couple of problems due to the limited ability of our particular arduino, we’ve still managed to get quite a bit of use out of it! We plan (as of writing this) to use it on our final product, and we hope that it’s versatility will help us greatly in the long run!
  4. Github pages/Markdown
    Using Github pages and Markdown, although not connected to our project specifically (besides through this website), has been quite the learning experience for me personally! Prior to this, I had minimal experience with HTML and website building, but now I feel as though I have a lot more in terms of possibilities for conveying my thoughts/ideas! More so, I feel like I know more about Github as a whole, which is a very popular medium for my major!

Major Changes

Although documented throughout this page, as well as our blogs, here are some of our most major changes throughout our project:

  1. Constant RPM to tracking RPM dynamically
    We’ve had to move towards tracking RPM in real-time, from our original plan of rotating at a constant RPM. This is gone into more detail above and in our blog posts, but the change is mostly due to hardware limitations for both the motor, and the slip ring.
  2. Solid 30 FPS down to a consistent 5 FPS
    Originally we had big plans for the display in terms of moving images (likely gifs) and high framerates, however due to a combination of the method of data transfer, the processing power of our Arduino, the communication frequency of the neopixels, the rating of the slip ring (as well as quality) and the max RPM of the motor, we are unable to meet a solid 30 FPS, and have instead decided to focus more on what we can do with what we have.
  3. Hall-Effect to IR Transmitter/Receiver
    We’ve gone to-and-from a couple of different sensors for keeping track of RPM, and although Hall-Effect has been the most stable, we still have a long way to go in order to produce a still image on the blades. Currently we’re looking at using either a LDR or IR receivers/transmitters, with a priority on the latter. We hope this will help us finalize the RPM calculations so we can make a stable image!

It’s quite interesting to reflect back on our original presentation to see some of the changes we’ve had to make…
We were quite ambitious at the start! But we’re still confidant we can refine AuroraFan into a product that we’re proud of!