Triangles Are The Strongest Shape

This week has been a real blur. I’m pretty sure I say that every week, but it’s extra true this week. I’m literally asking my teammates what happened this week (apart from today) because I don’t remember. The delayed mental fatigue from Critical Mass must be doing this to me.

We chose our final solution earlier this week, and our team will be moving forward with the Multi-cam design. Since its inception it has changed DRASTICALLY. We only have 2 total cameras now, combining an angled camera and a mirror to capture a wider and longer image, with less vertical distance.

A test image from our first medium fidelity prototype box

In our first medium fidelity prototype, we had a laser-cut Raspberry Pi camera mount attached inside a laser-cut wooden box. There was a slot in both sides of the box to hold a glass plate, and the mirror was placed on the bottom of the box. With this set-up the entire enclosure was 12 inches high, and the foot plate was 6 inches from the ground. It was fairly difficult to lift your foot and place it into the box onto the plate. Aside from that caveat, this set up allowed us to get entire images of the ’99th percentile foot’ which is the foot size, according to The Measure of Man and Woman, that is larger than the other 99% of feet of  the human population (presumably just in the United States). This prototype showed us that we could get away with a single camera to capture the image of the bottom of the foot, rather than using multiple cameras for that purpose.

In our next testing set-up, we received our new USB Web cams. It is super U G L E E. It was 95% duct-tape and about 5% cardboard. It was a wonderful environment for adjusting horizontal and vertical distances, as well as the angle of the camera itself. 

And we prototyped a super clean (masking tape fastened) box with real hot swap component action. This new medium fidelity prototype allowed us to test the camera angles, and debug/enrich our website.

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