Hey guys, please feel free to edit/add anything that you feel (especially with our later meeting--if you could just jot down some of your ideas that you had) January 30th, 2012: 9:15-10:00 a.m. Kunsoo, Matt, and Nick met with Prof. Wootton to discuss the project in more specific detail and what we should aim for in relevance to a problem statement/think about. An object sits in the tracer system and as air flows past it laden with oil a laser is sent through a diffuser to create a sheet of light, which is photographed moment to moment and compared through a computer to analyze particle movement. Prof. Wootton gave the following suggestions to aim for in thought: 1. droplets vs. smoke--which should be used as the particulate matter that is tracked 2. safety--as always 3. 3D modeling--at the moment the system only models air flow in 2D and it would be useful if we could come up with a way to create a way to bring the modeling into the next dimension 4. position system--pertaining to movement of the object and regulating the size/position of the stream 5. and lighting system--to improve the quality of the pictures/data gathered by the machine He had also suggested to think of making the system easier to understand with the naked eye; for example, is there a way to color the various streams or happenings of the system? Which brought us to the important point that we must work on focusing the stream more for it is not currently. Another issue mentioned was the idea that there were sometimes particles of a rather large nature within the stream, which would dominate the screen when present. To overcome this, it was suggested that we somehow curve the stream. This would allow the larger particles to drop out of the stream because they would be to heavy to make the turn. One last suggestion was that if we use smoke that perhaps we should try to generate the smoke near the object's position. As for budget, Prof. Wootton said that there we should aim at no more than $5000. 8:00-9:00 p.m. All of the members were present. We each discussed our ideas, first Keith, then Matt, Kunsoo, and lastly Nick. Keith had more ideas than the rest of us, but Matt had more realistic ideas due to his familiarity with the tracer system already. After relating to each other our initial ideas, we visited the project to get a better idea of what it was in actuality. Once there, we discussed the various ideas again and their feasibility. Lastly, we assigned everyone the task of adding their picture and link to the wiki and to have at least two main/strong ideas to share with each other on Thursday night to use as a part of the group's six sketches.