Week 3

Materials brought:

• chopsticks
• cardboard
• plywood (for the base of our machine) and a bit of excess plywood (being used as a ramp for the robot)
• wire cutters
• plastic cups
• iPad with stylus
• NXT robot
• string
• K'Nex

Goals for this week:

• Complete event #2 (rail system that leads to event #3)
• Complete event #3 ("plinko" board that marbles run down and cause stylus to touch iPad screen)
• (Optional goal) Map out the placement of each event on the plywood base board

Tasks performed during lab:

     The majority of this week's lab period was dedicated to the construction of events 2 and 3, the rail system that a ball follows and the "plinko" board that causes a stylus to tap an iPad's screen. We split up into two groups to expedite the construction process; Dave worked on the "plinko" board and Alex and Kush worked setting up the rail system.

     It was decided early on that K'Nex would be extremely helpful with creating a scaffolding-like structure that would serve as the starting point of the ball (which is pushed by the robot's arm when it's in motion at the start of our machine). Also, we decided to change the construction material of the rails to a thick wire that was made available to use in the lab. This wire was more pliable and was much easier to work with than our previously planned construction material (chopsticks). Construction was started but not completed during the lab period unfortunately, but it will be worked on in the days between this week's and next week's scheduled lab time. We expect this event to be fully functional by next week's lab.

    The "plinko" board was pretty simple, but tedious to build. The construction materials used were cardboard, chopsticks, marbles (provided in the lab), and a small plastic cup which will house the stylus and capture the marble that will fall. The piece of cardboard used was mapped out as to where each post will be placed. A hole was also cut out of the bottom of the cardboard that will allow for the marbles to enter the cup with the stylus. The tedious part of this construction was cutting down to size a number of chopsticks that will be used for the posts in this event. This proved to be the most time-consuming process of the build. Unfortunately, we found out we would need glue to keep these posts in place as just sticking them in cardboard would not be enough to keep them in place. This event would also have to be complete outside of the lab in the days before next week's lab. We expect this event to be fully functional by next week's lab.

     Our secondary goal of this week was also accomplished as we roughly mapped out the placement of each event on the piece of plywood. This gave us a basic idea of the amount of space we were working with and made us more spatially more aware of the size each of our events will have to be. Pictures of the sketched out plywood can be seen below (it might be a bit hard to see as they were done in pencil to allow modifications to the plan if needed):