Day 17 and 18: More project stuff

On Friday, we built motion modules for all the motions we'll need:

A functional arm! It only opens ~90 degrees though. This may need some modification before it really looks like an arm moving down...

A pusher for the flame (we changed the flamethrower move: instead of confetti, a little flame is going to extend out and back in of charizard's mouth).

A really geared up pouring mechanism, so we can control the flow of water with time pretty easily. Hopefully, no one will use more than 4 moves that require smoke...

We also built an arena out of poster board and punched holes with an exacto knife to hang it up with. However, we don't have anything to hang it /on/, which is a problem

Then on Tuesday, I started coding the HP meters in scratch and encountered a major setback: we only had four resistance sensors but eight moves. Prof Berg suggested using different resistors for different moves, so we modified the controller to have all the moves together.

Shirley went to buy all the building materials we'll need for this.. namely, felt, wire and tissue paper. We changed our minds (again): charizard will be felt on a wire frame and electrode tissue paper on a wire frame

Day 15 and 16: more projects

Last week, we finalized our movesets for the two pokemon:
Electrode: explosion, magnet rise, thunderbolt, mirror coat
Charizard: flamethrower, slash, earthquake, smokescreen

And we planned out what effects each move required and where the effects should go. The arena needs to light up (thunderbolt), create smoke in two areas (explosion, smokescreen, flamethrower), shake (earthquake), create confetti (explosion) and lift electrode (magnet rise). Electrode needs to light up (mirror coat) and rise (magnet rise). Charizard needs to move its arm (slash) and blow out confetti (flamethrower)

We begun to plan out one specific effect: the smoke!

The cup will contain water, and it will tip over a controlled amount to pour into a container of liquid nitrogen. We looked at how much water is required to produce an appreciable amount of nitrogen gas, and realized that the original syringe idea (squirting water from a syringe) wouldn't produce enough... However, this pouring mechanism is extremely buggy. It doesn't really pour, it splashes out water, and different amounts of water each time at that.

We also tried to create a fan to blow out confetti from Charizard's mouth. We used model magic to mold fan blades, and attached it to a motor. It didn't dry enough to test yet, but it doesn't look promising: the air it blows seems rather weak.