Saturday, February 22nd, 2003

After the Workshop, Jamie and I worked on prototyping, building on the ideas I had earlier. From 11:45 to 12:00, we thought about the basic wheels prototype I had built. Over lunch, we decided that we might be able to build parts of an inchworm design. After lunch, we worked on the system for extending and contracting the inchworm. We made a beam of K'NEX and used a discovery I had made long ago that with the right lengths, you can have one section of square tube blip over another. We made a lot of progress with a wheel-based design but I eventually decided that it probably wouldn't have enough traction to work reliably. I had a flash of insparation to wind up a string to pull the carrage along the tube but we quickly realized that we couldn't push the top section, anchored to the connector beam, u when we needed to expand the inchworm.

At about 3:45, we took a break and played SimCity4. When we came back, we just didn't have the same spirit we had had earlier.

Jamie:

I tried many k'nex designs but the gear and the wheel ideas were most productive. even though we didn't accomplish much we realized that using wheels was not a possibility because you couldn't grip the rope tight enough. the gears design was an utter failure at this point although i beleive that with a little work we could do it as long as we don't use k'nex