Complications

For the past few days we've been trying our absolute best to try and get our coke can Stirling engine running, but have had no such luck. The coke cans have proven to be extremely frustrating to work with as they have proven to warp and split far too easily when trying to work with them, this may be one of the key factors to the huge amounts of friction we get when turning the cranks as well as how taught the balloon is. Friction is one of our worst enemies when working with these engines as well as making sure everything is airtight. These are probably the most frustrating things to have to work against, as any small  amount of friction can stop the engine at any point. Everything has to be extremely precise and extremely smooth and personally I just do not see us being able to achieve this while using such rubbish materials. 

I suggested trying a more reliable set of materials and following a guide we found on youtube, we have started gathering materials to begin construction as soon as possible. I have a lot more faith in these designs as they allow as to achieve the precision we need far easier, as well as the container we will use will already be airtight so we wont have to combat that as much.

The Great Divide

Today, the group has split into two. The rails and switches side, and the engines and power side.Me and Edrian are in charge of building up our engines, a job which looks like will be a lot of fun but will probably be quite tricky.

Lucy and Tim are going to be in charge of switches and rails, so that we once we have our engines up we can really have this whole system up and running. So far we are looking at making our engines from empty coke cans, its a material that I already foresee as potentially having some issues with as they are not made from very strong metal and it doesn't take much to bend and distort the framework. I don't really know all that much about Stirling engines as they are a relative new concept to me, but from what I gather they run on heated air being moved around a container. Lucy seems to have done a bit of research into it though which helped me understand a bit more how they work which was good and I'm sure that that will probably make overcoming any issues we have slightly easier.

As for the rails, Tim and Lucy have looked at creating a sort of pinball rail type design, using 2 wires placed a specific distance apart and link together in an arch underneath. The ball then actually sits on top of the rails and set on an angle rolls toward its destination. Basically we rely on gravity to deliver the messages to their destination but need the engines first to bring the capsules to the top of the rails before they are going anywhere. I have a pretty good idea on how we would do that, basically by using a design not dissimilar to how a bike works. Basically there are 2 gears with a chain attached with the bottom gear being rotated by our engines. Attached to the chain are a number of buckets or cups that our capsules fit into and get lifted up to the top. A pretty simple idea but really our most efficient way of getting the height we need.

New start.

As we get back into working, I realise that this half of the semester we really need to focus on exactly what it is that we want to achieve within the time frame we have. We already know we plan on creating a rail system of some sort which we will us to guide our messages to their destinations, but need to focus on how specifically we are going to do this. 

We have looked at a number of ways of powering our delivery system but still have a number of things left to consider, including the ways in which we are making our network decentralized, how we are going to create the switching system so each message can be sent to the appropriate place and exactly how we are going to construct or create our powering system for these messages.

So far for inspiration we have looked at marble machines, and the rube goldberg devices for inspiration with our rail system. We have also looked at a variety of ways of powering our engines including, rocketry, steam, solar and hydro power to move our capsules from A to B. A number of complications were found with a fair few of these power sources. Firstly with rocketry there was obviously a huge fire hazard, and putting that into practice within a studio environment is not exactly ideal so we decided to scrap that idea but from there we decided to look at how people had generated power in the past and decided to settle with steam and air powered engines. These engines appealed to most of the group as it was a concept not many of us had explored before and seemed like a viable source of getting the power we needed in a way that was not only fun and exciting but reasonably cost effective. Below are a a few of the examples of engines we looked at:

Last day of semester.

Today was hand in, we handed in our film as the first half of our assignment and I felt it was quite a hit with the tutors, as it got the message across that we were trying to achieve.

Im a little worried about the productivity of our group at times, as we do tend to get easily distracted. I know other groups have been having similar problems but that is really no excuse. My goals for the next half of this project is to maintain a consistent work effort with less distractions.

Below is a link to the video:

http://youtu.be/_z5Gu9fsATU