Wind tunnel out of a Leaf blower hack

by SAUER

So, I was challenged to find the dead air behind an object. Not that hard right? Well, here's the catch, I can only use what I can find in shop class. Fortunately for me, there is a 3D printer, a leaf blower, some wood, spare vex parts, and a digitizer there. All I needed now was a photogate! I'll explain more later on. But in short, what I am showing here is the adapter I made for the leaf blower ensure equal fair flow across the wooden wind tunnel. In short, we have a 3 axis arm that has a digital switch (photogate) triggered when air flows, and when it goes from flowing air to non flowing air it makes a point using the Digitizer ... After a while there isn't any more dead air space, and you have a 3d printable model of the dead air space. All for less than a spool of plastic, $30 leaf blower, $5 photogate, 3 motors, and a microscripe (note you could use encoders if you wanted to, but we had the microscribe and wanted to make our lives easy.) Yeah I never got around to finishing this... Kinda graduated first and all of it was still in my highschool.