Everyone was in attendance to today's meeting.
We ordered a motor.
We made a CAD design of our project.
We ordered the parts for the laser cutting and 3D printing.

This part is meant to be laser cut and it acts as the base for the tower and it has groves in it so that the walls of the tower can fit and be stable.

These parts are meant to be laser cut and are the walls of the tower and they are going to support our motor, the motor is meant to lift a weight and drop it, so the tower also has to support the extra weight as well.

This part represents the motor and how it will fit into our structure.

This part is meant to be 3D printed and acts as a ramp that feeds the walnut into the device. We roughly measured the sizes of the walnuts which were inconsistently sized and the dimensions of the ramp seemed appropriate.

This part is the servo motor we have in our Arduino kit. This servo motor is meant to act as a blocker to prevent other walnuts from entering the crusher.

Today we went to the metrology lab and dropped our 1 lb weight on a walnut from 1 ft above the walnut. The walnut cracked from which we determined that 1 lb at 1 ft of height is sufficient to crack a walnut. With the guidance of our TA, we determined that 3-4 in*lb of torque is the desired output of our motor. We found a motor of that description on Amazon and requested it on the Google spreadsheet.


All three of our group members were in attendance at today's meeting.Each team member has devoted 1.5 hours to the project today.

Hi. It seems that we did not post everything that we were supposed to on the first post so here it goes.

Our team name is Project Awesome.

Our project is a nutcracker that will sense the presence of a nut and crack it for you.

Some Arduino projects that we found interesting include:

tapping shoes
http://www.instructables.com/id/Musical-MIDI-Shoes/

3d display
http://www.instructables.com/id/Led-Cube-8x8x8/

Today we prototyped the nutcracker and the clapper. We selected the nutcracker for our project because there is more to do for it. We also, remade our blog.

All three of our members, Duncan Allen, Benjie Roth and Randy Chea attended our meeting.

Each team member spent approximately 2 hours on the project.

Today, we brainstormed the following project ideas:

1) a nut crack that drops a weight on nuts when it notices that the nut is there.

2) a remote controlled vehicle.

3) a musical moving shoes.

4) a clapper that turns the light on and off when clapping.

and selected 1) and 4) to test. We arranged another meeting time to start the prototypes.

We also created this blog page and exchanged contact information.

The following group members were in attendance:

Randy Chea

Benjie Roth

Both team members shared tasks equally and spent approximately 1.5 hours on the project.