Assembely Line

The

The avarage times of stations in the assemboly line. As you can see, the greatest ammount of time was taken by station one, and the greatest by station 6, which is ours.

Visualising data

Kindles and the future of books

Congratulations. By reading these words you have proved that you are literate. That or you have a text to speech program. In that case get off your lazy ass and learn to read (my apologies to the blind). However, this simple form of reading is the most that the average human does nowadays. I’m not calling you stupid, I’m calling you lazy, but that’s fine, as most are. The vast majority will use their extensive learning ability to read signs or funny blog posts with little informative matter. That’s how things are right now, only reading four or five books a year, probably the same books you read last year.

As the brunt of this post will be discussing how this miraculous little machine changed my life (hand how I believe it will change other’s), it only makes sense to explain to you myself. I love to read. By the age of 14 I had already finished all of Asimov’s science fiction novels, was busy plowing through Clark’s, and was already testing the waters of other writers in anticipation for this current source drying up. I’m not bragging, I’m saying that as a child I read. I read a lot, I read all the time. My teachers complained of my continuous reading. I made significant headway into “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”, not that I understood what the hell was going on, I just loved reading so much that I just read it. So of course when I entered high school I went from a hundred books a year to about four. Why? Simple. High school is more difficult, and while I still had plenty of time to read, I felt my time more expensive. I felt it silly to start on a book of unknown quality while I could be studying, or, as it turned out, messing around on the computer, the difference is that it takes more effort to read. A computer is right there, I put in a website, and I stare at it for hours on end until I finish, many websites are never ending, if I enjoy it I simply continue on. If I decide half way I dislike a book, I can not simply hit back and try another, I must run to the library to grab another. Short of maintaining an expansive library —I do in a way, but full of previously-read books—, I saw no way to fix this. The books I did read came from my library, as they were close and I know how good they were. There was, at the time, no solution.

The Kindle is a game changer. All the benefits of the computer, of mucking around on reddit or stumbleupon, but with subsidence. If I dislike a book it takes but a moment to find another. The Kindle itself is smaller and lighter then a conventional book, thus I carry it everywhere. When I complete a book I am not left with a teaser of the next book by the author, but with a list of similar books I may enjoy. It’s stupendous. The Kindle has all the benefits of the computer, but with subsidence. I subside off science fiction. It fuels my mind. The internet gives me entertainment, but a good book makes me think and dream. Additionally, The Kindle is great as you can carry hundreds of books with you at any time. When you desire a specific books you need not search through bookcases, you can just read it. Kindles are not perfect, however. Some fear the downfall of the normal library, of the halls of dust tombs of knowledge. It’s easy to harbor such romantic feelings of this image, library have been in existence since writing was invented. However, technology must progress. Doubtless people lamented the loss of wooden ship in favor of metal, however it was necessary to continue advancement of sailing technology. Same goes for plays; The television made them obsolete. They still exist nonetheless, only in much smaller numbers. In this way physical books will exist, one’s favorite text will share your mantle with your candles and record player, not forgotten but not the star of the show. This is necessarily to keep track with the computer, which has changed us into spontaneous people low zero attention span.

I, too, will lament the loss of our oldest form of physical media. But there is no choice. Adapt or die.

Egg Drop Challenge - Iteration #1

We got 12 achievements!

Its me!

First off, here are our three sketches.

Our list of outside parts was the robotics ball and perhaps styrofoam. In addition, our materials fit cleanly into a paper box. There was a lot of empty space, as shone in the picture. Our project weighted in the vincinity of 250 grams, below the 300 gram mark.
We hit the bullseye, but our egg exploded. no joke.

It would seem as though the winners used Styrofoam for their project, which stopped the egg from dying. If were to do this again, I would have encased the egg in Styrofoam and then in the ball. Hopefully we could have accuracy and egg survival that way, but who knows.

Glider Challenge!

Here is our final glider design; it took a lot of work and many retries, but in the end it worked really really well!

The challenge here was to, ideally, build a glider that went further faster then any one else's. We could only use balsa wood, tissue paper, and hot glue.

Thus we started brainstorming! Firstly the rules, any idea is good, and constructive criticism is welcome, as well as building off others ideas. First I brought out the Helicopter, but no one seemed partial to that. Then we  breifly considered just making a parachute in the hopes no one else's glider would function correctly. We quickly scrapped that idea. Then we figured a big wing is probably best. Then we thought of adding a second smaller wing, but we were unsure if that would help much. Nevertheless, we went with the second.



Knowing that we had to fry far and long, and we could only work with Balsawod and tissue paper, we got to work solidifying our design.

Final, glorious solution

We built a simple airplane, and it worked out great! Then we found our design in balsa wood (BAE systems had handed them out to robotics clubs), and it worked even better!

After constructing our glider we found that it fell to earth fairly well. We desired that it started to fly and would never land. Thus we decided to change the "crashing" part of our designs. The question was how? se we decided to add weight. It worked great! The added weight kept it in the air for much longer. After adjusting the weight many times, we eventually came upon a sweet spot that made the glider fly very well.

Our glider flew very well, beating everyone easily. Thus I would have changed nothing, our glider preformed better then I thought it would.

Ping Pong Ball Shooter

Here is the launcher. I adjust the distance by changing the launch angle. Bring up the red things to launcher further, lower to launch closer

Engineering Capstone Project

Note: When someone changes your password and whatnot as a joke, it takes quite a bit for Google to get around to fixing it for you.

Initially we dove into the project with what looked very much like our finished product. However, we briefly experimented with different designs, ultimately using our final design as it was the quickest and easiest to build.

This is our initial design. A track would move marbles to a power track that would sense the reflected light and move to the correct bin. We quickly discovered that this would take way too long, and thus we quickly forgot about it.

This was thought up to address the speed issues, using pistons to force the marble to roll off at the correct place. We figured this would work fastest so we prototyped this. We quickly discovered that our light bounce off idea doesn't work at all, so we quickly moved on and forgot this idea, as we needed a more creative solution to filter the wood and metal.

 Here we employed the gate idea, which was only high enough to admit the wood and metal marbles, which were later sorted via a magnet. However, it was much much too slow (took about 4 minutes for 15 marbles) and the marble would frequently not fall correctly on the sensing cart, the idea was quickly changed to remove the cart, using the "moving bins" system that Cody pioneered.

Here is our last design, including the last's track design, with the color sensor on the track and the bins moving. We were able to get the time to under two minutes, but marbles would frequently get stuck and fall into the wrong cart. This was later fixed by adding another piston and moving the color sensor, a simple fix that cost us some time.












Decision Matrix

Here is our DM, with the fields "Fast", relating to how fast we could process 15 marbles, "Accurate", how many marbles went into their correct bins, and "Easy", how easy it would be to make this design. At the time we thought that design 4 won all these categories, but we later discovered that design 2 would have been the easiest to build.







Final Design

This is an overview of our design modeled in Blender.  you can see the moving cart system as well as the added piston (Large blocks signify pistons, small ones indicate our color sensing equipment). Nothing much to say here, other then this design proved to be accurate and fast, and quite simple (Although it take much tinkering to make it work correctly).

The added piston removes the sensing from the marble gate, as multiple marbles could get caught in there at a time. This made it much more accurate, and stopped multiple balls from going on the same cycle. We also added a second compressor, which helped a lot as the design took up a top of compressed air.

We accomplished our objectives very well, in my opinion. We had 15 marbles sorted in less then two minutes, and we could cut down that amount drastically via fine tuning, but we did not have enough time to do this. Our solution changed little from our first construction, mostly fine tuning, and changing the cart to a set of bins, for this took much less time and came with its own set of challenges. Additionally, changing the light sensor to measure the amount of light that passes through the ball as opposed to bounces off the ball made it much more accurate, although it bounce off had worked we could have differentiated the marbles only via a light sensor, not with a magnet. Our project very neatly fulfilled the problem statement, as we accomplished all the goals and did so quite elegantly. Although some other designs would have beaten us time wise if given enough time to work out the kinks, ours prevailed on simplicity and ease to build. I learned how to iterate our designs and pull from other people, then adjust these ideas to form new ways to accomplish a task. If I were working alone I doubt that the project would have ended as it did, most notably the moving bins idea from Cody or the marble gate from David. The purpose of this exercise was to learn to design a product, then make it. We did just this, although the project ended up to be designed rather organically without any sort of review session, more “This is an issue, and this is how I think we can fix it”.

Achievement wise I would suggest one fro not using pneumatics (for those parts were in short supply), along with general "uses least parts", and especially one for using few solenoids, for those were rare. Other then that no part became rare that could not be worked around.

Blogger is not allowing me to log in, i will try to fix the issue as soon as possible. Sent via text. Sorry about this

Here I took the inermenting of avariable and split it off into a subprogram. I also added some meters and some more functuality (speed of increase). Subprograms can be used multiple times, so they cut down on compile times, and complexity of the program. Also, if an error developes in the pubprogram it only needs to be fixed in once, instead of in every place you used it.

Variables and Fun!

Here we are adding one to a value five times, once the value hits five we quit the program. Easy enough.