Long time, no post

It appears that I got caught up in the craziness of the first few weeks of school and failed to blog. Below is a summary of week 2.

Week 2
I stayed on team 3, so it was up to my new team to flesh out the design encompassing the wind, daily, and inflation elements that we were assigned. We chose to bring the passively ventilating "wall-indow" completely indoors. The concept was to create a breathable partition between rooms within the home, which would be able to filter particulates out of the air and increase the natural circulation of air through the home. The inspiration for the form of the project was the bellowing movement of a jellyfish. When engaged, the bellows would push air through a carbon filter and distend a fabric covering on the other side of the wall, creating what we intended to be a unique breathing visual effect. The schematic of the "jellyfish wall" is shown below.

Payton and I worked on the wiring and coding of the RGB LED's within the acrylic substructure of the product. We calculated the number of resistors in parallel that we would need to not fry the 9 LED's (also in parallel) from the 5 volt Arduino source, and then proceeded to solder and connect them together. The circuit diagram and an image of the wall (multiple modular jellyfish units) is below.

The code for the pulsing of the jellyfish relied on Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), and a change in red to green color (green = 1- red). 

During week two our group definitely worked within our prescribed disciplinary stereotypes. The art and design students worked on sewing the fabric and making the bellows for the design, the architecture students made the computer models and lasercut the acrylic components, and the engineers made the jellyfish light up by programming, wiring, and designing the circuit layout. Much of the criticism of our project was based on its utility. Many people were concerned that the volume of air that it would push through the house would be too substantial, or that the the closing of the bellows would be too loud if we used actuators to actually make it. I like where the other groups took this design after I moved on to another project. Although moving it to the outside of the house and relying on natural air pressure to enable a good seal might be difficult to achieve.