This shortened week served as, essentially, an extension of what we worked on last week. We just recently got our hands on a LED light band, and the goal is to attach it one of our knees and film the motion of walking with the band in a dark room. The idea is to see if there actually is viable kinetic energy there to be extracted and converted into electrical energy. And while that will be apparent to the eye, it will still require some sort of function or program to pull some quantitative data out of that. We are also planning on contacting the people behind the BioMotionLab animation of the walking motion of the human (see last week's post) to enquire the possibility of receiving any numerical data from them. Kinetic energy is defined as .5(m)(v^2), and if mass remains constant when walking, the velocity (directly proportional to kinetic energy) is where we must focus on. Just after school we came across this paper detailing the analysis of human walking provides a table on p. 392 that shows that the knee contained the highest VMo (velocity motion data) of the tested body parts. The paper is clearly quite dense and will require a more thorough evaluation, but it could be useful to us.
We also researched different parts for our project, namely the magnetic neodymium balls. Thankfully they are all very cheap, none costing more than 10 cents a ball. Several sites are: http://neoballs.com/#, https://www.kjmagnetics.com/products.asp?cat=12, http://www.magnet4less.com/index.php?cPath=1_14.
1) Need to start study some parts of the "Human Walking Analysis" paper in details ASAP.
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3) Detailed system block diagram.
4) List of required materials for purchasing.
3) Detailed person-by-person assignments for next week.