Wednesday April 2, 2008
This morning started out with building a cardboard house. We laid cardboard down on the top of the table, then put cardboard behind it in the corners. We needed a window to take pictures through, so we added a Plexiglas window in the 3rd side of the "house". We had four sides of the house, and decided we needed a roof to keep in flying shrapnel of paintballs and paint. We took two sides of a cardboard box and tented them to make a roof. Our shelter for the paintballs was complete! Then we started to mount the camera. We used a plastic box, and then laid a cardboard box on that. We positioned the gun so that the barrel rested upon the cardboard box and duct taped it into place. Then we decided to hook up the flash with a sound trigger. We shot several shots to make sure that it would work, and we succeeded in ripping apart the cardboard in the back of the box. We hadn’t planned on that, so we put a sheet of Plexiglas in the back of the "house". We started taking pictures and could only capture the smoke coming from the gun. We decided to use a photogate instead and went about setting that up. We had the two sensors and had to rig up a setup so that it would capture the paintball as it was coming out of the barrel. We made a E shape out of cardboard with the middle line missing, and attached the two sensors. We took a few pictures, capturing the paintball as it was leaving the barrel. We then tried to set a delay, but couldn’t get it to work. Then we realized that the cardboard E holding the photogate sensors was bending so we spent about 30 minutes building a new triangular shaped cardboard accessory to hold the photogate. We succeeded with that then spent a while trying to get the photosensors to work in the light. When we turned the lights out they worked though and we spent the rest of the day trying to get the timing right to take pictures of the paintballs as they hit the wall. We ended up breaking the Plexiglas that we used as a backing and had to put more up. We did get close to getting the pictures we want though, and are close on the timing issue.
Thursday April 3, 2008
Today we continued to try to capture a picture of the ball bursting on Plexiglas, but after much trouble we decided that we needed to make some revisions. So first off, we replaced the cardboard photogate with a metal one and decided that instead of changing the delay, we would just move the position of the gun. After moving the gun forward about 10 cm and replacing the Plexiglas target with a hard black target hanging from two clamps, we were able to capture a few photos of the ball actually bursting. Tonight Olivia and Catherine are going to build a new house with a new window so that tomorrow we can capture the pictures that we want in higher quality and speed. Our goals remain the same and all of our original plan is the same, it’s just time for some improving of strategy.
Friday April 4, 2008
We made a new house last night because the old one was collapsing in on itself. It’s working so much better now. The photogate was working (for the most part) and the delay was working and the new house was much easier to use. Life is good. At the end of the morning session, we ran out of CO2 in the paintball gun, but we were able to fix that easily by asking for another tank from the paintball guys. All our shots have been really good, most of them in focus with the right amount of splatter and shrapnel. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get to the stage of shooting different objects, but we might be able to do some one Monday. Overall, today was a really, really good day.
