Process of Snow Ball

If there is a comparison between the ideas in the team, snow ball would be our favorite.

In terms of the weather api by Open Meteo, we tested with requesting temperature, rain, snowfall and weather code data. The rain and snow data is in format of depth. Because we did not have a clear clue of that indicators we were using some rather vague ranges for the if statements.
https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=40.4406&longitude=-79.9959&current=temperature_2m,rain,snowfall,weather_code

It didn't took us that long that the solenoids couldn't really punch enough beads to the air for that effect.

After that we started with testing with a 5 volt mini dc fan (photo below), we got a first go with that. Prof. Daragh encouraged us to use a much more powerful 12 volt dc fan and that feels like we finally got the chance to use a proper fan.

To test the effect we started with a rough model composed of a plastic cup, aluminium mesh screen. But in order to minimize the beads from flying all over the place, a rubber band, which is suggested by Prof. Daragh is really helpful. Among the material tested we found the appearance of the foam bead is really intriguing so we decided to work on that.

The pattern of the DC motor moving backwards is also a treat, during the test process, it kept spinning back and forth smoothly as we were testing on the granite counter top (see the YouTube video below).

Also we notice that id we point the fan up the structure of the DC fan with a framework blocking the center of the fan would block the air from blowing to the middle of the container. By reverse the direction, the air sucked out of he container tend to have a more decent result to blow on all the bead.