Task 4- Foray into Adobe Illustrator and Prototype Development

After today's meeting to lay down a more concrete vision and plan I decided that instead of taking a picture of what I'd drawn, I'd actually try to put it into a more legible form.

This is what I made in Adobe Illustrator, which, I will admit, was quite an adventure.  I didn't know what a lot of the hidden functions of things were so it was a very trial and error creation.  The smallest hexagonal shapes are the bubbles, or pillows, that we discussed in the previous iteration of our project design. in each cell there are 13 small bubbles connected to one another. The idea was that we could connect four of these cells and have them fill and empty simultaneously.  Each of these four cell units would connect to a pipe loop encompassing the entire surface.

 

This is one such arrangement of the units.       

This is another one I thought would make the assembly a little clearer.

Initially I had a difficult time figuring out what controls, buttons, and erratic behaviors resulted in what in AI, but after about half an hour I figured it out.  I really enjoy doing stuff like this, being able to create wonderful visualizations of what I'm thinking that clearly portray the intention of my design.

I have to say I also really love designing things like this, in MSE I don't typically have much occasion, if any, to do anything like this.  I actually sincerely thought about going into industrial design so that I could do stuff like this, at least as far as my perception of the field lead me to believe.

Tonight I'll be working on servo-valve assembly, and hopefully helping Neil with the coding for making all  of this be able to be synced with the data being read from a flex resistor on one of the cells to determine fill rate.