Final Post

At long last our machine is finished and the competition is over. We lost in the first round, but quite frankly we are happy our machine worked at all. It didn't come out quite how we first imagined it, but we all agree that our original design is something to be laughed at.



Are you laughing? I'm laughing.

After we learned what materials we would be given to build our machine, we started to make a new solid model. This is the final design that we based our working machine off of:



Our final machine doesn't have walls, it has four wheels, motors everywhere, the arm is much longer and shaped differently as it is made out of PVC, and most of the dimensions ended up being far different from how they are represented in the preliminary design. We ended up using three motors: one to drive, one to move the joint up and down, and one to rotate the arm. The machine drives very well - slowly and with a lot of power, like we wanted it to. The arm also rotates pretty well but because the center of rotation is so far from the arm's center of mass, we couldn't get as much force out of it as we wanted to. The motor controlling the movement of the joint did not work, however. This was due to poor constraint of the rack and pinion coupling and small rotations of the joint that produced large unwanted friction between the joint and the bars it was supposed to slide on. Fortunately, the movement of the joint was relatively unimportant and we were able to compete. Here we are at the competition, our machine on the right:



It almost looks like we have a chance here.

Well that's all folks. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.



ALSO:

Total Cost: $94.26

Final Bill of Materials