Our project is to create a digital aquarium for Discovery Space. With this children will be engaged and be able to have even more fun when visiting.
Sponsored by: Discovery Space
Team Members
Nick Nigro Cody Reeser Brennan Hyde Hammad Aldhaheri
Instructor: Tahira Reid Smith
Project Poster
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Project Video
Project Summary
Overview
Fintastic Four’s project aims to give children an interactive digital aquarium experience at Discovery Space. Fintastic Four’s goal is to create this exhibit in the most budget friendly manner and make it operate as autonomously as possible. This exhibit will allow children to be in control of designing their fish and capturing an image of them to then be displayed via a projector.
Objectives
Fintastic Four has many objectives but they can be grouped into a few major ones: minimal users to operate (i.e. autonomous), easy to use, and child safe. The goal is for a child to color in a fish, have a button be pressed to take an image of the fish, and upload that fish to a display via a projector with very minimal work to be done by Discovery Space staff or children using the exhibit.
Approach
When Fintastic Four was first assigned this project, a majority of the customer needs and requirements came from Discovery Space, the sponsor of the project. How the team met those requirements was in the blue. With advice from the point of contact at Discovery Space and our project coordinator, many options opened for the team to look at. The first concept the team came up with was far from the final prototype today. The team researched three patents, even reaching out to some of them for a step in the right direction. It was early on when the team had to adjust this project to fit within the budget. Discovery Space is a short drive from Penn State’s campus. Due to the short commute, bi-weekly meetings took place to make sure the project was moving along smoothly and to avoid any miscommunication. Most of the effort for this project was spent on the software. Subtracting the background from the image, animating, and treading took a lot of time to research and test to get to this final prototype. The software testing was in short doses, not going a few days without putting everything together to see if all the elements worked together. Once the software was completed, CAD (Computer Aided Design) models were produced to model the housing compartments for the hardware. No numerical results were gathered, only visible observations of the software and the hardware.
Outcomes
As mentioned before, the team reached out to prior patent owners to get an idea of how to start and how to handle the budget. From these contacts, the cost was north of $100,000 for installation costs and over $20,000 more per month to use the available software. Fintastic Four only used $800 of the $1,250 budget to create the project with no recurring cost other than repairs. While this project is on a lesser scale than other similar projects, the sponsor is saving over $100,000 because of this project. Due to the lesser scale, in the team’s testing, the prototype took only 30 minutes to set up at Discovery Space. Discovery Space can resupply any broken or worn parts at a moment’s notice, tool wear and maintenance times are at a minimum.