The competition was on Thursday. We finished our machine on Tuesday night. We had some slight alterations from our original plan that we presented in the Design Review. After taking a look at our competition, we saw that there were no teams that were going for the bin at all, so we decided to scrap the bin blocking module we were going to have. Our final machine ended up consisting of a leadscrew, arm, motor housing box, and a support for the end of the lead screw. After our seeding round, we realized that the arm got jammed when the balls piled up, so we added a motor on the support at the end of the lead screw to pull up the arm. Here's a picture of our machine assembled in the slot:
One major problem we had that we didn't realize until the competition was the string we used to pull up the arm was not strong enough. When we were making it, the kevlar thread was out, so we used kite string instead. In both of the competition runs we did on Thursday, this thread ended up breaking, so we had to replace it after our first run.
Another improvement we would have made would have been to use the external gears to give more torque to our arm. As it is, our arm had enough torque to push the balls, but not when they got jammed.
Here's a picture of our arm in action:
Our strategy for the competition ended up being get a ball over the center line and hold the arm there to block. It worked for the first round. We got one ball over and were able to hold the arm there to prevent the other team from scoring any.
Thanks for a great semester!
No comments:
Post a Comment