Week 7: Minimal Viable Project

If anyone has ever pondered about the uselessness of singing glasses, I can assure you, they bring absolutely no good to society. If you have been spared of the knowledge of what a singing glass is, let me take away that blissful innocence: it is an acoustic phenomenon where by rubbing a moistened finger around the rim of a thin glass you create a continuous tone, which you can modulate by adding or subtracting water. I thought it would be fun to find a way to automate it. My first design, which you can see right here, came with what I thought was the most close replication of what the human finger did: a motor that goes around in circles.

I thought this was a rather schematic/simplistic idea at tackling this problem and was convinced that there had to exist something better out there (lol) but decided to go ahead with it for my minimum viable project nonetheless. I was hoping to get some kind of structure working such that I could then mount the hydraulic pump and an ultrasonic sensor at the top to control the levels of water. I wrote a baseline of code but ran into a pretty significant problem: my prototype was so unstable and loud that it was nearly impossible to get the glass singing.

To remedy this I decided to take the advice from the MVP presenting session, stop trying to make the top spin and instead create a spinning base for the glass. Find out how that went in the next thrilling chapter of this story...