Blog post #3

Last week we finished the Halloween animatronic project, which we had been working on for the past month. my group decided to use a witch's cauldron as the base for our design. Initially, our plan was to have objects moving up and down inside of the cauldron, and a witch moving around the perimeter. We ended up getting rid of the witch idea and only did the inside of the cauldron. Our final design used cams that were attached to rotating axels. as the axels and cams would rotate, the followers on the cams would move up and down. we attached ghosts and a pumpkin to the top of the followers. One thing that could have gone better in this project was planning. even though we were able to finish on time, we wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the witch work, which we were ultimately unable to do. However, I think that we did a good job at solving problems that arose along the way. For example, when we tested our design, we noticed that the follower kept falling off of the cam. We were able to fix this by adding layers of fishing wire that sat between the follower and the top of the cauldron. I also think that our group worked efficiently. one thing that I learned during this project is that will help during the capstone is that it's important to set realistic goals and that you should always expect to run into problems along the way.