October 13, 1995

Progress of the Lazy Entrepreneurs

Midterms Deal A Mighty Blow To The Intrepid Pilgrims.

Once again, tests, labs and projects from other classes reduced the amount of time spent on this project. We realize that we will pay for this fact in a couple weeks. However...

Garrett recommended that we plate silver onto dining hall silverware, due to the ease and inexpense of that reaction.

All of the electroplating reactions require pre-treatment of the target object (i.e. cleaning and chemical activation). We decided that the pre-treated object can be provided to the freshman, because pre-treatment is much easier in large quantities.

We discussed possible metrics of the project.

Economic metric: a "price" will be charged for type of LEGO used.

Engineering metric: some kind of light sense to check the completion of

the electoplating, and/or the speed at which the

object was plated. Our main concern with any particular metric is that it cooresponds roughly to real-world industrial process metrics.

Over October Break:

Garrett will finalize the reactions need, including voltage and material requirements.

Jeff will build a mechanism to deliver the object to the various vats.

Tom will test the LEGO board to determine the voltage and current outputs, so that the reation voltages can be taken directly from the computer.