December Developments

Welcome back!
This December has been extremely busy and we have gotten a lot accomplished this month. After receiving several of our ordered parts, we started the process of building our first prototype. We hope to finish it by the Mid-Grant Technical Review.

Earlier this month, we were grateful to have WJLA, an ABC affiliate, visit us at our school and interview some of our members. We were on the news that afternoon.
View it here: WJLA Article

During the interviews, we were hard at work disassembling printers, hoping to learn something about the paper intake system. We also salvaged the motors from the printers and hope to utilize them in our intake system.

The torn apart printers

 

Speaking of motors, we have been hard at work soldering all the microprocessors and sensors, which allowed our programmers to start tinkering around with the code to be able to test our motors and sensors. We hooked up UV lights to a breadboard to find the locations of the UV strips in each bill and tested for values using our luminosity and UV sensors.

Finding the UV strips in the bills

 

While our programmers have been focusing on the virtual aspect of the project, some of our other members have started creating mockups of what we think our product should look like. They have been working on a mock intake system made out of balsa wood and rollers extracted from the printers. This will hopefully give us an idea of how to intergrate out the rollers in our finished product. We hope to combine the intake system to the sensors so we can map out the location of each UV strip on each denomination.

Mock intake made out of balsa wood

Video of how our mock intake works

 

Our Sustainability Leads, Grace Kim and Grace Tang have achieved their Solidworks Certified Sustainable Design Associate Degree. We can now start to use SolidWorks for feedback to reduce the impact our product will have on the environment. In addition, research is being conducted to find the best type of battery to power the microprocessor, sensors, and motors.

Grace Kim and Grace Tang teaching us about sustainability

 

December has been busy for us and we have been making great strides toward our end goal! You can follow our progress by following us on Twitter and find out how you can help by checking out our Website!

-The Poolesville High School InvenTeam