The Chronicles of the Dancing Egg
Part 1

Wednesday 2/6/13 4pm - 2am

Today Federico and I worked on finishing the construction of the Egg and I began working on the Wireless Communication setup using the XBee transmitters.
====

Our first challenge was to get the Egg to stand up on it's own. We brainstormed and thought of many different alternatives:

- Using a brick
- Using a rock
- Using small rocks
- Using sand
- Cutting a flat surface on the bottom
- Using rope to flatten the bottom

We finally decided on using small pebbles (found outside the Architecture building) because when the base of the egg was scooped out, the smaller pebbles could fit better and added density.

Both the brick and the rock were two irregularly shaped and thus caused the egg to fall over often.
====

The next challenge involved getting the egg to move. We came up with these alternatives:

- An upside-down pendulum using a servo motor at the base of the egg and a stick with a weight on the end.
   (This method proved unsuccessful, as the weight would not come back up after the egg had tilted to the side)

- A normal pendulum
   (This method also proved unsuccessful as the top portion of the egg could not hold the weight of the motor and pendulum. In addition, putting any weight on the top of the egg caused even more balance issues)

- Water weight
   (As shown in this video:    <insert link>, we tried using the shifting weight of water to "wobble" the egg, but it was too inconsistent.
====

Work with the XBee shields:
Then I first plugged in the XBee to the Arduino and the computer, I thought it would work perfectly.
It didn't.
After working with it all night, these problems surfaced:

First I figured out that the computer needed to be configured with FTDI drivers. These drivers enabled the computer to "see" the XBee that was attached.

Second, I needed an interface to configure the XBee. The standard program recommended by Sparkfun is only built for Windows, so I had to find another one called "CoolTerm".
====