February classes, MLG, and a toy President

Hey All,

Reading Week has provided much needed time to work on our project! First things first, over the next few posts, I will be doing a recap over what has been taught to us over the last few classes. This, in turn, will provide a template of skills and tools that can be utilized for our prospective class project.

Last week, our class worked on GoogleSketchUp. I decided, or at least attempted, to sketch a model of the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. The historic building, otherwise known as the "Grand Old Lady" on Church and Carlton Street, was built in 1931. See images below.

Side view (Top) and Front view (Bottom)

After working on my depiction of MLG - I shifted my focus towards integrating the tools provided by SketchUp for our project. Just as a refresher, Catherine and I are building a model of the White House. The model will contain an interface as a means to communicate historical information pertaining to a specific president of the United States of America. We searched Google for a SketchUp model of the White House. We were lucky - we found a detailed scale model of the White House. See pictures below.

South Lawn

West Wing and South Lawn

North Lawn

This SketchUp model is beneficial in many ways. First, it provides a blueprint on how to create detailed sketches. Second, in terms of our project, it showed a detailed version of the White House for our model that will be constructed using foam core. We expect to use construct a similar model (not as detailed) and place an action figure of a president in a certain spot on the model. See below.

John F. Kennedy Action Figure

When placed on a certain spot on the model, the action figure will trigger the interface via weight sensor. As of right now, we have purchased the foam core and are awaiting the arrival of our President of the United States of America (toy version).

My next post will be focused on using the Arduino. Stay tuned!