E2G2

5/06/09 We worked on our make project proposal, we had to finish our timeline, and we tried to get it approved, and we discussed new ideas. We learned that we will need to make a unique project to get it approved, and we have our idea. We need to know actually how long this will takes us, and if we can get it done on time. We have pretty much gotten our project apporved, and we have had to change our actual idea to get it approved. We didn't plan that we would need to change it, so we are going to have to start a bit behind the rest of the people. We cannot really solve this problem aside from rushing with the rest of the building portion of our project.We really want to, and need to know how long this project is going to take, because we already know that we need to leave things to set over a day long period, and that maybe the casting will take a few days for each light. We are not having many difficulties right now, but we might have some later. next time we should probably review the rubric before handing in our proposal, so we do not lose this time. 5/08/09 Today, we got our make project approved, we made a materials list, we also had to change our ideas to get our project approved, we changed our idea from having one flat LED night light, instead we are going to make a bunch of small cubes, and make the cubes interchangable. I think our idea will work, but instead of now only needing one mold, we are going to need to make more than 1 mold, maybe 3 or 4 if we want to get our project done on time. 5/11/09 Today we worked on getting things in for our project, made some measurements on the foam core, and worked on our daily timeline. 5/19/09 Today we finished our mold. We still need the resin die and some type of stir stick. Other wise we are ahead of our plans.

5/12/09 Today, we got our first coat of our mold done, and a Hazardous/Toxic materials sign.

5/13/09 Posted by Weston media type="file" key="E2G2pdcst.mp3"

5/29/09 Posted By weston Since 5/19/09, we have started our first light, and put in and finished our first layer. We didn't get the resistors in yet, so we are busy soldering the lights. We picked out which constelations to do so that when we get there, we will already have that done. We put all of the lights in their specific designs and we have soldered the first 3 or 4 constellations finished. We found out that CJ already knew how to solder stuff, so she is doing most of it. But not all, for some molds, Mazur (possibly Andrew) and I did a bit of soldering.Mazur's soldering didn't work out nearly as well as CJ's (and neither did mine) so she is back to doing the soldering. For the soldering, we have one person putting the posotive and negative leads together while the other person is soldering the one that the other person just did. For some constellations, such as corona boreallis ( a very small one), we had the person who solders just go and put the leads together for that one and the other person just skips it. As for materials, we have all of our materials in except the resistors, and they are necissary for the next step, so we are skipping that step until we get them in school. It is obvious that we need to move faster because at this rate, we will only get 1, MAYBE 2 nightlights done. We should do work over the weekend, at lunch, and at pretty much any time that we aren't doing anything and the materials are where we are. We needed to make our own mold, and that took many, many class periods of work to make, just because we couldn't find one at a store. Plus, during our meeting with Mr. McCloud everybody (some people already knew it) that we need to always have somebody doing something. Often times (sorry Andrew), Andrew is just goofing off, just because we didn't tell him to do anything specific. He (and everybody else) need to make sure our posts on the wiki are as good as possible. If there is 2 or 3 minutes of class where we are waiting for something to dry or something, we should add a couple sentences to our posts. Like now, CJ and Andrew are soldering, Mazur is getting pictures for my post, and I'm posting. Everybody is doing something. Thats how it should always be. We need to work on our workload and making sure everybody is doing something, at all times.



6/3/09 Posted by Andrew

Today, we had a team meeting, and we learned that our project has a very small chance of being finished on time. We also learned that us making a home-made mold was a bad choice overall. We probably should have brought in our items in on time, let me just bring in my plastic mold, and not have relied on me to bring in items. We think that if we bring in one large mold, and then measure our smaller mold we can make multiple night lights using one mold. We agreed on, if possible, to let me bring in my largest mold, and then we will build the next few lights from inside of it. We are going to put cardboard box pieces where we need to make lights. Then, we will make all of them at the same time. If the coats all take a day to dry, we could put in the resin to all of them, all at once. We hope that this will work. I guess it will, but only if we put all of our effort in the next few class periods. Oh yeah! We feel that we are probably going to finish our first nightlight in the next few days. Our goals now are to finish soldering everything together, and to finish the rest of our project, or at least a few night lights.