Conclusions & Future Work - WG

The most important thing we learned in the assembly process was that the cams needed to be perfectly parallel on its faces. If we were to redesign the mechanism, we would make sure to 3D print the shaft to ensure the correct placement of the disks. 

Something we would want to do in the future would be to include other components, such as the fish jumping out of the water that we wanted to include. Because the waves were askew, they blocked the opening for the fish and so we weren’t able to include them in the final prototype. The other issue we faced was that the hole for the shaft would have to be lower than where the paddleboarder would be. In order for the fish to rotate, their radius has to be shorter than the distance between its origin and each of the other shafts. Our mechanism was already as big as we wanted to make it, as to conserve materials and time, but there still wasn’t enough space for the fish to appear above the water without hitting the shaft. To include other components, we would have to make the assembly much bigger by making the waves much longer. 

Another future addition would be to animate the motion of the paddle. However this would be very complex as the entire paddleboarder is moving.