Final Project: Finishing Touches

Now that the main parts were done, all we had to do was make it look good. This was a fun part.

We decided to call our little game the Man-ipulator, in true Wellesley fashion, and we made our guy a nice, preppy Harvard boy. With a bright yellow baseball cap (I thought his head looked empty).
We spray painted the box black, and then added a little bit of sparkly spray paint. Voila! Instant party atmosphere.

Because we were done with a few days to spare, we decided (after prompting from our professor) to make the program better and tweak a few little things. I rearranged the motors so there was more space and changed the string from nylon thread to floss. The string had been slowly unraveling, and looked generally messy. Because the floss is already coated in wax, we knew that it wouldn't unravel.
As for programming, things became a little bit more complicated. This is where we ran into some trouble. At first, the motors would just keep rotating, pulling the puppet right into the little spools we had attached to kept the thread in place. It was a little stressful. However, after a few hours of work, we had a working code!

These new codes worked REALLY well, and we were super excited about them. Now, instead of the puppet moving a limb to its full extension when a pad is pressed, the limb moves only when the pad continues to be pressed. So now we could have little movements. To prevent someone from reeling the puppet all the way into the motors, we put a cap on how much they could rotate. That way, even if someone stayed on the pad, the puppet would just stay at its full extension. This way, two limbs could be moving at the same time, making for a much more dynamic dance.