Final Project--The idea takes shape!

The next week, we went on a field trip to Tufts where we were to present more detailed versions of our top two ideas to Lyn, Chris, and the class.

At this stage, Clara and I had already nearly decided to pursue our creep idea (who am I kidding, we had practically made our decision the moment we came up with the idea), so we focused most of our attentions on him.

We came up with this more detailed game plan:

 

Having decided what we wanted our creep to do, the next step was to figure out how to make everything happen.  We divided our creep's main actions into two steps, stage one and stage two.

Stage One: The initial creeping motion, activated by person approaching creep.  

We wanted our creep to peer above the lid of his box using some sort of elevator mechanism, and potentially move back and forth slightly.  We thought we might be able to accomplish this 'looking around' motion by putting a magnet in the creep's chin, and another, somehow mobile, magnet in the rim of the box.  We thought the magnet in the box could be on some sort of track so when it moved, it pulled the head slightly along with it.

Note: Quite soon in our building process we decided that, since the creep's ability to look back and forth was not vital to our project and we already had a lot going on, we could abandon the magnet idea.

Stage Two: The pop!

For stage two, we needed some sort of mechanism that would allow our head to pop quickly, since a slow pop doesn't scare anybody.

We had a variety of initial ideas for this mechanism:

One involved a motored spool (motored in one direction, free rotating in the other), bungie cord, and motor controlled lever.

Initial idea for stage two mechanism

Our idea was that the motor controlled lever would hold down the creep head, which would be held taut by the bungie cord.  When the lever released, the head would shoot up because of the taut bungie, before being reeled back by the motorized spool.

Another idea we had was very similar to the first idea in principle, but involved a ratchet instead of the motored spool.

After our brainstorming session, Clara and I were very excited to get to work to see if our ideas would be successful!