Week 7 Updates

5/16/18

We worked more on the PIR Sensor today. Namely, we tested to figure out which pin was the one associated with sensitivity. We set up a simple circuit with an LED to test this until we found which orange pin on the sensor was to change time and which was to change sensitivity.

The stepper motor was also nailed down today. This will be used to spring the bear up from out of hiding. The next two pictures show the breadboard and Arduino Uno board layouts.

The bottom left picture shows the stepper motor at its "resting" position, and the bottom right shows the "activated" position. 

While this setup worked well with the wood plank, when the weight of the bear was added to it, the motor did not have enough power to push the bear up off of the ground. We have been weighing our options on how to proceed:

• Use the smaller, lighter bears on the stepper motor setup
• Use two stepper motors to try to increase the power
• Use a new overhead pulley system (still with the steppers) to pull the bear up instead of push.

5/17/18

We met today to decide and build the solution to the problem stated above. After weighing our options we decided to try the pulley system and hoist the bear up. After obtaining a pulley and some string, we secured one end of the string to the head of the bear and one end to the stepper motor, on which we attached a string gathering system. After several tests, the rig eventually worked. With this set-up, the bear will be reeled up by the pulley system. See below pictures.