Once upon a time, there was a gibbon named Maggie who lived happily in the southeast Asian jungles. Then, however, a developer arrived in the jungle and planned to cut it down. Maggie wanted to save her jungles, but she wasn't sure how. Then she noticed that the workers left the keys to their truck in the open while they took a break. Now, Maggie was unusual -- she had been born with magnetic feet! So her plan was to swing through the jungle, pick up the keys while the workers were away, and save her forest!
Between 11:59 pm on Tuesday and 12:01 am on Wednesday, Team Gibbon concluded that Maggie the Magnetic Gibbon was incapable of swinging, and she transformed into Maggie the Macho Gibbon, who was captured and wants to escape, so she's doing pull-ups while holding dumbbells with her feet in order to get strong enough to escape.
The transformation was a little like Cinderella, except not at all.
Last night was Transporter Night, I ate too much because upperclassmen are the nicest ever and bring wonderful food to the studios, and I did not get anywhere near enough sleep.
So, the problems with the gibbon. In under thirty-six hours, we went through at least fifteen iterations of the mechanism that was supposed to control the elbows for the swing. It either didn't move the elbows enough or didn't interface well with the mechanism that moved the upper arms or just resulted in too much stress, leading to mechanical failures. It was usually the last one -- so many mechanical failures. Pulleys breaking apart, servos coming unattached, no matter what connection methods we tried. The prototype that I said was semi-functional earlier? Worked a couple of times and then broke, and that happened for every mechanism we tried.
By midnight, we gave up trying and switched. With a gibbon that did pull ups, we only needed one motion for the arm, so we rearranged our servos, changed some of the gearing, and after a couple of hours of changes and testing, we had a gibbon that did pull ups. After that, we just had to make changes to the fur covering so that there wasn't too much friction for the arms and legs to work.
We tried to be excited about the new story and the new motion, but it was very obviously a back-up plan, and not a well-developed one. One of the terms on the instructor's evaluation form is "dry motion," and our motion was definitely dry. It was hard to tell what most of the fourth graders thought. I think we at least got good scores for looking like a gibbon, but for moving like a gibbon and being a toy they would want to play with? Probably not so much.
But it's done. The studio is all clean -- only our prototypes and our final toy and environment are left on the table. We turned in peer evaluations and final project specs.
Design Nature is over.
Hooray! You survived.
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