Design Summary

Analyzing Ideas

Throughout our design process, we ended up with multiple design ideas that would be equally interesting when put together individually. These designs contained a trampoline which a ball would bounce onto and an arm that would feed into 3 different baskets that ended up in the same place, a sorting arm that would make the ball go into a funnel or on a trampoline, and a shooter designed to shoot three different distances into baskets.

With the first design, there was a clear problem with the trampoline, as there was no way to control which basket the ball would bounce into, or if the ball would bounce into one of the baskets at all. So for this design we decided to take the ball catcher we created last week, and replace the catcher with a trampoline. Above the trampoline was a speed sensor which calculated where the trampoline needed to move based off of the speed of the ball so it would bounce correctly into a funnel.

The second design seemed less interesting, and did not seem reasonable to build due to the time restraint we had, so we decided to scrap the idea and have the ball go on only one track.

The third design seemed very interesting to us, so we decided to attempt to put it into action with the use of only one distance and one catcher. For this design we had 2 DC motors with wheels on them that hovered over the track and sped the ball up to the appropriate speed to jump a small gap into a catcher. The catcher would lead to a plinko board into another catcher, allowing the sculpture to loop again going back onto the track with the speed sensor. Additionally, we had to add a feeder that would only allow one ball to pass every three seconds in order to give the motors a chance to spin up to full speed after each ball passed through. This feeder also had a touch sensor which would allow a user to dispense a ball manually, however this button could also only be pushed every 3 seconds.