Week 6

Goals of Week 6:

• Demonstrate reliability of Rube Goldberg
• Test with adjacent groups

Tasks Performed:

This week began to work on reliability within our own Rube Goldberg.  We encountered many minor problems this week that were not considered before.  A common problem was in our first event transfer, the robot would hit the ball of event 2, but it wouldn't slide down the rail.  This was due to carelessly placing down the robot.  Now the robot is placed in the correct spot every time which is marked on the board.

Another common problem was the robot's ultrasonic sensor not sensing the balloon in front of it.  This was difficult because the balloons varied in size and were very inconsistent.  A solution we found was taping a piece of printer paper to the balloon, almost like a wall to make a big target the robot could not miss.  There is no problem when the balloon pops because the paper falls out of the way.

When about to demonstrate our Rube Goldberg machine the phone fell and caused the last few events to trigger.  This was due to the phone receiving many text messages.  The solution to this is putting the iPhone on "Do Not Disturb" mode, and only allowing FaceTime from our computer allowing the phone to vibrate. 

Attached is a video of the complete Rube Goldberg running properly.

Connecting our first event to the previous group's Rube Goldberg proved to be a challenge.  Our first event begins when something hits our Robot's touch sensor.  The previous group has a ball that will roll down into the touch sensor, however it is not yet accurate enough to hit it in the correct spot.  After many tests we've concluded that making a K'NEX track to guide the ball would work, and possibly using a more dense ball would help with reliability as well.  We tried the transfer many times: a few times it worked, many times it ran off course, and sometimes the ball would hit the sensor without enough force to trigger anything.

Our last event involves our robot pushing down on a ramp hard enough to activate a power switch on the other team's side.  We were unable to test this this week because the other team added a K'NEX piece with hot glue to the power switch which did not dry in time.  Our ramp has been modified slightly to have more weight so it takes less force to push down the button.  The idea is to have the weight from the robot going from one side of the ramp to the end be enough to trigger the event change.