This is perhaps the oddest week of the whole class and certainly one of the most hectic. The whole week revolves around building a machine as a group.
We finally settled on making a machine that functions as a zen garden. The idea for the final design is to have an XY axis with a magnet move underneath the sand (which will have its own little magnetic ball inside). This would allow the user to make shapes in the sand via magnet. We tried different types of sand:
Though ultimately stuck with using white sand instead of the black sand we had ordered. I helped with some of the physical machine building, including soldering some connector wires which control the XY motion of the magnet (this was actually additionally fortuitous as I had to do this quite a bit for my final project as well):
In the end the machine looked quite good and was very aesthetically pleasing. Of course, the lighting certainly helps:
And here is the machine in action: