Design Challenges

Problem 1: The speed Sensor is a terrible sensor and has multiple problems. One, the speed sensor has a problem where the thing starts having wildly inaccurate readings after one sculpture run and has to be re-plugged in after every run, and the speed sensor sometimes didn't read speed at all, and sometimes when it was reading correctly the NXT read 565 m/s, and messed the system up, so we switched over to our original concept of a color sensor which was much more cooperative with automating the color sorting.

Problem 2: It was hard to produce a trapdoor connected to the NXT Device because we were only allowed to have one NXT. We decided to produce a manual trapdoor device connected to the bottom of the dropper funnel, although this means the design isn't fully automated and therefore needs human interaction to work correctly.

Problem 3: None of the group knows how to code so it was hard to program the robot into doing the intended task of sorting, so the coding took about 4 hours trying to get the speed sensor working before giving up and instead spending about an hour working with the color sensor because we weren't given template code for the color on the website and the configurations for making the color sensor work were different across the internet so we had to ask another group who was also doing a color sensor to get the code working.

Problem 4: The design inherently takes about 10 seconds to sort the ball, so it's impossible to sort multiple balls at once without completely changing how the design works at the moment, a problem we'll have to address when making the complete sculpture.