The last week of our ME 250 class went fairly smoothly, and we managed to finish up most of the final touches to our machine over the weekend. All of us were now very comfortable around the machines in the shop, so the minor adjustments that we had to make to some of the parts was not a big deal. Unfortunately for the Expendables, our team was faced with some problems when we met with our GSI for the final time on Wednesday. Our machine was manufactured very well, and all of our gears meshed very nicely, however, our team did not realize that the controller was on mixed, so the left wheel was completely uncontrollable. This was unfortunate for us, but we figured that we could come in as the underdogs for the slotbot competition on Thursday and place fairly well. We successfully made it to the 2nd round, however, our machine did not move quite as well as we would have liked. Below I will explain how our machine works.
Our car is driven by the dual gearbox, and two planetary motors drives both the delrin jaw up and down, and the sliding door wall side to side. All of these components meshed very well in the final design of the car without slipping which we were very pleased to see. Getting the gears to mesh properly was quite the challenge though, and our team ended up spending over a dozen hours just trying to make the gears match up properly. Nonetheless, we completed this task, but the dual gearbox was still not powerful enough to make it over the white ramp at even the highest torque output which was very frustrating.
If our design had managed to go over the white ramp, our aluminum flippers on both sides of the machine would have trapped the squash/ping pong balls, and driven over to our bin with easy. Unlike other teams, our car had no problems turning, so literally all we needed was a stronger motor and we would have managed to score many points. After depositing the center balls into the bin, our machine would also have the option to capture the side balls with the delrin jaw. We would simply reel in the squash/ping pong balls with it into the bin. After our team scored adequate points, and our team was winning, we planned to use the deployment door and drop erasers into the opponent's slot to make it more difficult for them to score.
Despite the fact that we were not able to make it over the white ramp, we believe that our machine was still a success, because it was still a fully operable machine that all of us are very proud of, and it taught us a vast array of knowledge that we will be able to use in the future.
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