Saturday was our big day. We were presenting our seismometer project at the Festival Znanosti in the Bevk plaza in Nova Gorica!
We were all quite excited, and even did some extra work during the week. A great deal of help came from our newest member, Riccardo. He’s a mechanical engineer, so he was tasked with constructing a better base and a sturdier way to attach the sensor. With some help from the others, a base was built from a thick wooden plank, and we made a mechanism that allowed adjusting the angle of the sensor lever.
Riccardo made a mathematical model, which helped us to predict the optimal angle to get the maximum mechanical gain. Here we got stuck a little as our predictions weren’t quite truthful. We thought about it for a couple of days, and then it hit us: we were supposing the magnetic field between the two magnets was uniform, but in fact a significant border effect was present! To measure it better, we attached a vibration motor to the base with some zip ties and tried multiple voltages to have it run at about 100Hz. Then we rotated the actuator arm and determined at which angle the amplitude was highest. Afterwards, we used a rubber band and a screw to adjust the sensor’s rest position at the previously found angle and we were done!
The festival was quite amazing, we got lucky and had a really sunny day, and there were quite some people! We explained our project to everyone that seemed interested, and handed away all our flyers. There were some students passing by, too, so we hope to get some more members in the near future! We met our booth neighbors, a HAM radio group from Nova Gorica, and Aljaž quickly started talking tech with them. Soon ideas started popping out, and we swore we have to set up a mesh network with a social component (like, for example, video chat) to do some experimenting.
Here are some pics made by our resident geologist, Flavia:
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- Here Aljaž is explaining how does the seismometer work.
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- This is (nearly) the whole team behind the stand (from the left): Alessandro, Arturo, Aljaž, Philip, Riccardo and Simone.
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- Philip does the presenting!
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- Matevž from m-aleja is showing off the latest LEGO mindstorms.
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- Philip working on his personal project: a hand-controlled hand!
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- Philip’s beta testing his hand.
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- Aljaž in all his nerdiness!
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- A lateral view of our stand at Festival Znanosti.
And here is our poster, in high quality PDF.
We of course thank a lot the guys and gals at e-hisa for this wonderful chance to show our work and meet interesting people!
