Proposals for Project Meeting 7/17/2012

[dhj]

We talked at the planning meeting about potential projects for this coming Tuesday (7/17/2012). With the exciting work of bylaws we didn't have a lot of people there so we thought we'd open the floor for suggestions for next week's meeting. Tomorrow we will set up a poll with all the suggestions from this thread to determine the project focus for the next meetup. If you have other ideas please post a brief description!

Solar Auto Chicken Coup (Planning)
Katie has some friends with a chicken coup and they are interested in adding a door to their chicken coup that's solar powered and lets the chickens in and out and also counts the chickens that enter and leave.

RepRap (Planning + Initial Construction?)
3D printer planning and hopefully some initial construction depending on parts availability.

Trebuchet (Planning)
Planning catapults.

Potato Gun (BYO Parts)
Build your favorite potato gun design. We will point out a few options or design your own. Bring your own parts. Also some planning to incorporate potato guns into control systems.

[houston]

For the potato gun, we could divide into groups, have each group make a different type- spring-powered(like a nerf gun), pneumatic( like with a chamber pumped with a bike pump), and, um, combustion powered, then compare results.

I volunteer for the bike pump one, since it fits well into my human-powered walking tank plans.

A reference: www.spudfiles.com/forums/cannons-t1718.html#13305

Here's the rangefinder I was looking at. It wouldn't be applicable in this case, because it only goes out to 3 meters, but I'm sure we could come up with something: www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/UltrasoundSensor

[drprofessordanger]

Any info on creating burst disks to a specific pressure? Layered aluminum foil maybe? I will bring my compressor. We will need to do experiments to see how much pressure aluminum foil can take. Our max PSI, for safety's sake, should not exceed 100.

Someone bring a bag of potatoes

[drprofessordanger]

Where are we going to shoot these off?

[dhj]

What's the typical distance? There's a small field down the creek. Or we can shoot into the creek for testing.