Dyah Setyaningsih: Difference between revisions

<gallery mode="nolines" widths="110" heights="85" perrow="9" caption="Chia seeds growth gallery">

Jade variation: green-colored leaves; Pearls & Jade variation: green and white pattern leaves<gallery mode="nolines" heights="85">

|Yellow leaf cut becoming brown. Also becoming brown (closed): a stem extension without leaf, so only 1 stem with leaves grow further. More roots grown. In Seramis medium: look stable, stems seem strong. New root buds emerged in water medium. Stems seem going stronger. Grown roots got longer. I think they will survive winter. They seem to grow more while i was gone, but maybe it was just a trick of perception, since I would compare them with the last time I saw them.

Note: In the end, only 1 group of Pearls & Jade Pothos survived and grew a new leaf, that is the one which had 3 leaves in the beginning of cutting. The other ones I experimented with (by only growing 1 leaf or 2) were rotten. Lesson learned: always grow as a group, compared to Jade Pothos (they can be grown as single leaf). Propagating in water was faster to grow roots, but Jade Pothos also survived in Seramis medium. Younger leaves were faster in growing new leaves, maybe because of more growth hormones?

During the process of making the bubble machine, unfortunately I broke my ESP32... I'm still not sure why, but perhaps it was due to false wiring. Thus I made this wiring diagram so that the wiring could be clear. I tried some free tools to make wiring diagram, such as but in the end I stick with EasyEDA to make this. The wiring diagram helps me a lot in reproducing the wiring I wanted to do, as well as to ask opinion from Christian or someone else for consultation.

Since I wanted this installation to be a standalone one, I powered the ESP32 with the power suppy of 12 volts, through a buck converter of 5 volts, 1 Ampere. For this, I went to an electronics store in Erfurt (Bastlerland) and showed my wiring diagram for this project. The guy in that store recommended me this solution and I followed it.

For the bubble machine itself, I needed a fan, a rotating motor, bubble sticks and a container for the soap bubble liquid. To produce more soap bubbles, the motor needs to rotate faster. The bubble sticks need to dip into the soap bubble liquid and then they will pick up the soap liquid to be blown in front of a fan to produce bubbles. To test out this logic, I made the first prototype out of cardboard. This turned out to be helpful for consideration of measurements for the final prototype. Other than the bubble machine as a whole, I also did trials on the CO₂ sensor in the plants' enclosed environment. Moreover, I tried to experiment with the closeness of the fan to the bubble sticks, for it to be able to blow bubbles. Through the trials, I found that the fan was strong enough to blow the bubbles only in specific areas, with a certain closeness. Therefore, I needed to consider and experiment with the distance and placement of the fan towards the rotating bubble sticks.<gallery mode="packed-hover" widths="260" heights="180">

To build the final prototype for the Winterwerkschau, I decided to change the casing material to transparent acrylic sheets. I think it matches the concept that everything is transparent/translucent. Before building the real physical final prototype, I tried out several online tools to help me, such as 3D sketch plan, 2D blueprint and optimization software to cut the acrylic sheets, to know how much materials I needed. Because the dimension of my final prototype will depend on the bubble sticks (attached to the rotating stepper motor), and also the length of the breadboard, I decided to use half-size breadboard instead of a full-size one, since the full-size will be redundant for this project. The wiring diagram helped me to consider this, since I wouldn't need that much space of the breadboard. The half-size breadboard minimized the length (or depth) dimension of my prototype a lot. In building the final prototype, I learned a lot how to be creative in finding solutions with common materials or tools that I could find in the lab (either diyElectronics Lab in B15 or Electronics Lab in M5), at home or in the city. I'm glad that I made it work in the end:)

Technically it was challenging, since it was the first time I learned ESP32, plus I broke my first one in this class... But lessons learned, always make a wiring diagram and triple check everything. I usually only deal with digital problems, so prototyping with electronics and physical mechanical things adds dimension in the project, which means when I encounter a problem, that problem could be in any dimension and I couldn't really pinpoint where. Throughout the class, I experienced that problems can arise anywhere: cables, ESP32, understanding of mechanical/physical things, materials, tools, device specification that needs specific usage in the code, etc. But that's just the art of prototyping, as my friend said. We're not doing a finished line of production, so enjoy the ups and downs, the successes and failures. Fail fast is also better.

I feel like I spent most of my time designing and planning for my prototypes rather than building the prototypes, both for the cardboard prototype (first prototype) and also the final one. I wasn't sure how it was supposed to be made, but I kept thinking about the measurements and the mechanisms so that I could make them work, at least logically and visually in my mind. Sometimes even night and day, that I got a little bit overwhelmed. In the end though, I compromised the accuracy aspect and focused more on the functionality/mechanical things to make it work. "Just try it out" was definitely a motto for this project.