Week 5

In the pass week’s lab the group was introduced and experimented with to Knex.  The whole lab was dedicated for the groups to get familiarized with Knex and have an idea of their building versatility and their constraints.  For the first part of the lab each member was able to experiment and play with them.  After each member understood how they worked, the group discussed how they would be using them to build the bridge.  The group made several accomplishments during the experimentation with Knex like been able to use the right building pieces to bring the cost down, while keeping the strength of the structure. 

         The transition from designing a bridge by using WPBD, to building a “real bridge” was quite significant.  While WPBD had its own constraints, it was a really versatile program regarding the design of the bridge.   It didn’t have any major constraint that would prevent us from building a bridge in any way.  There were no length of the trust nor angle constraints.  The program was really efficient in telling what would be a design that would work from one that would collapse. Its use was significant and of great importance for coming up with a prosperous design.  After playing with Knex several limitations were found.  The main limitation was that the gussets would only allow pieces to be put on two angles, 90 and 45 degrees.  For the group’s bridge this would be a limitation because the second level side cords needed to be on a certain angle to be able to get a greater strength.  Another limitation is the fact that Knex only considered of building cords of specific sizes.   Also the cords will have one specific diameter and we would not be able to play between bars and tubes as in WPBD to bring the costs down. Knex is the fact that they would not allow the group to build the bridge the same way it was designed originally.