Hello again. As we near the end of B-term, we've started looking hard at how to get the funds we need to build this wall. The hope of having the wall up by the end of C-term has slipped away, but it seems likely that we can have it built over the summer. We've made some progress getting approval, though it seems like every person we talk to tells us to talk to someone else as well.
Lately, the group has been working on and commenting on a few different documents: An article about us in the school paper, a letter to Alumni requesting funding, and a letter to various companies requesting support. We wanted to give every group member a chance to give input on these documents, so we've decided to use Google Wave to write/edit them. So far, it's proved to be significantly more useful than email for this sort of thing.
That's about it for now, look for our article soon in The Towers.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
Status update
Hello all. There have been some interesting developments lately.
Contracts/Liability/Money
WPI does not want us to build the wall ourselves; they instead want us to give plans to the official WPI contractor who will build it with his team. We've talked to the contractor, and it does not seem realistic that he could build it within our budget constraints. In light of this, we've contacted RockWerx, the construction company that built Central Rock and MetroRock. Their prices are significantly more reasonable, and the hope is that we could have them do the construction.
Tech Wall
We never quite had the heart to give up on our high-tech bouldering wall idea. Instead of trying to integrate electronics into the wall we're building on campus, we've decided to build a prototype for the tech wall elsewhere. Because it's unlikely that we will be doing the construction work for the on-campus wall ourselves, we will have time to create this prototype high-tech wall.
We would like to prove that our concept is scalable, so our current design is to build two independent modules. Each module will be a 4x10 wall, with a light and sensor in every grid space. The electronics will be modular as well, so that more wall-pieces could be added on with minimal extra effort. Our proof of concept will be an 8x10 wall with adjustable angle for each of the two 4x10 wall-pieces.
We have some sketches and more design ideas, they will be up soon.
Contracts/Liability/Money
WPI does not want us to build the wall ourselves; they instead want us to give plans to the official WPI contractor who will build it with his team. We've talked to the contractor, and it does not seem realistic that he could build it within our budget constraints. In light of this, we've contacted RockWerx, the construction company that built Central Rock and MetroRock. Their prices are significantly more reasonable, and the hope is that we could have them do the construction.
Tech Wall
We never quite had the heart to give up on our high-tech bouldering wall idea. Instead of trying to integrate electronics into the wall we're building on campus, we've decided to build a prototype for the tech wall elsewhere. Because it's unlikely that we will be doing the construction work for the on-campus wall ourselves, we will have time to create this prototype high-tech wall.
We would like to prove that our concept is scalable, so our current design is to build two independent modules. Each module will be a 4x10 wall, with a light and sensor in every grid space. The electronics will be modular as well, so that more wall-pieces could be added on with minimal extra effort. Our proof of concept will be an 8x10 wall with adjustable angle for each of the two 4x10 wall-pieces.
We have some sketches and more design ideas, they will be up soon.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Moving forward...
Hi everyone.
This is the beginning of a hopefully constant stream of updates on our project, now that our IQP has officially begun.
Meet the Team
Our current team looks something like this:
Thomas Liu (CS/IMGD, 2011)
Felipe Polido (RBE, 2011)
Morgan Quirk (CS/IMGD, 2011)
Richard LaMura (Aero, 2011)
Evart Fairman (ECE, 2010)
Daniel Nuzzo-Mueller (PH, 2011)
Sanado Barolli (ME, 2011)
Karl Gibson (CS/IMGD, 2011) was a part of our project and has made signifcant contributions but has decided to go to Denmark instead of being an official part of our project. Thanks Karl!
Finding a Room
Last year we went about the task of finding a place on campus to put this. Space on campus is surprisingly limited and in the end we were looking at two locations: the third floor or Olin Hall and the bike room in East Hall. Some final communication at the beginning of this school year more or less solidified our location to be in Olin Hall. At this point we're waiting for funding and final approval from the Physics department head.
Funding
We managed to raise some pretty hefty funds towards climbing holds for the wall with our Adopt-A-Hold program. I think we had quite a presence on campus so word has spread about our project and we're even getting interviewed by the towers tonight at our weekly meeting.
Obviously funding is a big issue with this project. There's certain liability when it comes to students building things (especially things that will be climbed on) on campus, so we've been looking into getting a contractor to build the wall for us. We've gotten a quote of around $17,000, which is a little higher than we'd expected.
It's looking like we may be able to get support from the SGA so this project is becoming more of a reality by the day.
We're currently reaching out to outside companies for support, and we'll update as more information comes in.
Moving Forward
We're getting ready for all of the engraving that we need to do as part of the Adopt-A-Hold program and working to secure funding.
A 3-d model of the room and a proposed look for the completed wall is in the works and we're doing some more investigation into the tech wall idea.
Look forward to more posts!
-Thomas
If you're looking to contact us, send an email to iqp at wpi dot edu. Yes. It's the best iqp mailing list ever.
This is the beginning of a hopefully constant stream of updates on our project, now that our IQP has officially begun.
Meet the Team
Our current team looks something like this:
Thomas Liu (CS/IMGD, 2011)
Felipe Polido (RBE, 2011)
Morgan Quirk (CS/IMGD, 2011)
Richard LaMura (Aero, 2011)
Evart Fairman (ECE, 2010)
Daniel Nuzzo-Mueller (PH, 2011)
Sanado Barolli (ME, 2011)
Karl Gibson (CS/IMGD, 2011) was a part of our project and has made signifcant contributions but has decided to go to Denmark instead of being an official part of our project. Thanks Karl!
Finding a Room
Last year we went about the task of finding a place on campus to put this. Space on campus is surprisingly limited and in the end we were looking at two locations: the third floor or Olin Hall and the bike room in East Hall. Some final communication at the beginning of this school year more or less solidified our location to be in Olin Hall. At this point we're waiting for funding and final approval from the Physics department head.
Funding
We managed to raise some pretty hefty funds towards climbing holds for the wall with our Adopt-A-Hold program. I think we had quite a presence on campus so word has spread about our project and we're even getting interviewed by the towers tonight at our weekly meeting.
Obviously funding is a big issue with this project. There's certain liability when it comes to students building things (especially things that will be climbed on) on campus, so we've been looking into getting a contractor to build the wall for us. We've gotten a quote of around $17,000, which is a little higher than we'd expected.
It's looking like we may be able to get support from the SGA so this project is becoming more of a reality by the day.
We're currently reaching out to outside companies for support, and we'll update as more information comes in.
Moving Forward
We're getting ready for all of the engraving that we need to do as part of the Adopt-A-Hold program and working to secure funding.
A 3-d model of the room and a proposed look for the completed wall is in the works and we're doing some more investigation into the tech wall idea.
Look forward to more posts!
-Thomas
If you're looking to contact us, send an email to iqp at wpi dot edu. Yes. It's the best iqp mailing list ever.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Design and Information Document
Here's a document we wrote that talks about the specifics and acts as a project pitch. We presented this document to some members of the WPI community, including President Berkey.
Document
Document
Monday, June 8, 2009
Technical - Computer Science
This blog will be a way to document our project and gain some interest from the community. I'll start out by describing some ideas about how we're going to approach the computer science side of the project.
Our current rough plan is as follows:
1. Write some low-level serial-port interface code in C to talk to the electronics. We don't know exactly what will be required here yet, but probably some functions for scanning the sensors and maintaining the lights will be necessary. Ideally there will not be much C code.
2. Write the necessary wrappers to be able to import these functions from Python. I've done some research and found that this is not too difficult.
3. Do the rest of it in Python, using wx for GUI components. There's going to be a lot of code in this segment.
4. We entertained ideas of making web applications for some of the functionality we want to support. We'll see.
There will be (at least) two main functions of the software. Primarily, it should provide a simple interface for climbers to find and select a route. Once it is selected, the system will control the lights and any tracking/games/competition routines that apply. Additionally, the software will provide functionality to allow administrators to set new routes, modify settings, etc.
Our current rough plan is as follows:
1. Write some low-level serial-port interface code in C to talk to the electronics. We don't know exactly what will be required here yet, but probably some functions for scanning the sensors and maintaining the lights will be necessary. Ideally there will not be much C code.
2. Write the necessary wrappers to be able to import these functions from Python. I've done some research and found that this is not too difficult.
3. Do the rest of it in Python, using wx for GUI components. There's going to be a lot of code in this segment.
4. We entertained ideas of making web applications for some of the functionality we want to support. We'll see.
There will be (at least) two main functions of the software. Primarily, it should provide a simple interface for climbers to find and select a route. Once it is selected, the system will control the lights and any tracking/games/competition routines that apply. Additionally, the software will provide functionality to allow administrators to set new routes, modify settings, etc.
Blog up and running
This is a post to introduce our climbing wall project and to test the layout etc.
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