The detailed documentation of our group is in this post, and below is my personal reflection.
We started connecting after watching the tutorial video and the circuit diagram. I followed the instructions in the diagram below and connected the wires, but at first, I connected everything the opposite, but fortunately, we managed to notice the error before connecting the circuit to the laptop. Also, I soldered the electromagnetic actuator. This is technically my first soldering experience, but it went better than I expected. I soldered the two ends of the actuator to the wires.
I think one of my biggest learning experiences in the prototype prep phase is building the ultrasonic sensor. This is my first experience working with ultrasonic, and I referred to the example code here:
Switch cases and ultrasonic sensor
I wired the ultrasonic sensor in parallel to our #1 circuit of the stepper motor. And worked with my teammates on the Arduino coding. And I think the best thing I learned here is that when controlling the tail movement vertically, the mechanism behind the code is actually controlling the rotation of the motors, and it is closely connected with the distance (ultrasonic). I worked more with 2D codings previously, and I think the codes in Arduino need more mathematic mindset because our ultimate goal is to have our structures move.
Also, I think the developmental process of our project is valuable. We first had this idea of making a tail because we intuitively think it is tightly related to communication (revealing, hiding, exchanging, and transforming). However, we didn’t have a systematic design for this project, so we did some research on the exoskeleton structure and came up with a more put-together concept, and elaborated on the original idea. Afterward, we started drawing the sketches to see how we could wear this piece. Our original thought was to use a “necklace” as part of the design and fix this device in the front body. However, the material we used was too heavy for this design, and we finally decided to make shoulder straps and a belt. Also, it can hide our Arduino and wires as well. It also intrigues us to think about the whole device and the “protection mechanism” in our group documentation: it can hold more weights and more branches to mimic the protection system.
We will have more concrete sketches and modelings that are achievable in the later stage.