Tristan and I hung out and did some work this week. Tristan got some code running to translate time into motor steps based on sunrise and sunset times from a table. actually making a little motor moving! I got some models built up in CAD.

Lambda: I got a sketch built up (that moves if i click and drag the joints!) so we can figure out the scale of how large things will end up being. Dimensions in this model are dependent on one another (where dims say fx:___) so i can just change one dimension and everything is proportional to that! Next step is to model up a potential linkage. Initially, I was using Fusion360 to model (which sucks) but now I got Solidworks running (woot!) so this will be about 1001% faster to develop.

Moving Wedges:

based on the sunrise and sunset times during the year, this concept will move two wedges that represent the dark time of the day. on the left we have summer solstice: the wedges are close to the bottom, we have mostly daylight. on the right we have the winter solstice. wedges are up. the small 8 hour chunk at the top is all the daylight we have. we can watch our days slowly fade away and then return.

moving these wedges will be a fun engineering challenge. I have a mental concept of using some belts. stay tuned next week for a solidworks model that illustrates this (or doesn’t).