Rube Goldberg machine

What is a Rube Goldberg machine?

A rube Goldberg machine is an elaborate multi-step process that achieves a simple goal. For us we were unsure of what we wanted that simple goal to be, but after a couple days, decided to do a car drive. Ya, real exciting this way we could have hot-wheels as cars and then we could do elaborate things like build an elevator and a jump for the car. These sadly both ended up being compromises we had to live without. However we were able to make a pulley so in the metaphorical sense that was our elevator.

STEM

Reflection:

Our first blue print as seen on the left, had a big jump and lots of dominoes these were the only changes compared to the new blue print. Some other problems we occurred whilst doing the project were getting it to work particularly the pulley which would get in the way while the marble tried to roll down. So we had to find a way to get the marble to go around the pulley we also had to find the kinetic energy of the machine which resulted in having to get videos of us filming it working.We needed to film because the velocity which the equation for is distance/time so we had to find out the total time it took for the machine to work this took multiple attempts and we eventually got clip of the board working.

If I could change one thing we did during this project I would have built the most difficult feature being the pulley first. This way we wouldn't have to work around the ramps we placed but around the pulley giving us a more precise and better working machine.


Ten steps

  1. Our first step of our machine was the first car being pushed by one of my colleagues, the car would roll down and fall of the ramp and crash into another car

  2. they would then activate the seesaw and release the Lamborghini

  3. the Lamborghini would roll down the "street" and crash into the pulley (elevator)

  4. that would cause a piece of wood to move

  5. that piece of wood will cause a marble to fall down a screw

  6. the marble will roll around the pulley and hit a car to activate it

  7. the car will knock over dominoes

  8. the dominoes will hit over more dominoes after sliding down a ramp.

  9. the dominoes hit the last car to start rolling

  10. the car rolls into jail

5 simple machines

  1. the wheel and axles located on the hotweheels combining six in total

  2. the screw and the marble rolling down acting as our metaphorical car driving down a parking garage

  3. the lever acting as a seesaw holding on to the Lamborghini

  4. the inclined planes acting as streets for our cars

  5. and lastly the pulley acting as the elevator to the parking garage where the marble will roll down

3 elements of design

  1. We have many lines that cause a zigzag kind of design for our project

  2. The second element of design we have is shape because we have multiple enclosed spaces like the jail and the ramps are all enclosed shapes.

  3. The third element we have is texture because of the netting we’ve placed on the ramps provides a different more rugged texture then the smooth sanded wood we have the netting mounted on.

calculations

Ramp 1 Potential Energy of the car= 8.96 Newtons

Ramp 2 acceleration = 0.7 meters/second

Pulley mechanical advantage= 4

Force needed to activate lever= 0.69 Newtons

Potential energy for the whole board=30.7 Joules

Total Kinetic energy = 26 Joules

however not all of this is 100% accurate due to friction and air resistance.

construction log

Day one: We attached the first three ramps and started the mount for the pulley

Day two: We attached two more ramps

Day three: We attached the two final ramps and added netting on the first ramp

Day four: We made the screw and added netting on the second ramp

Day five: We began work on the base and the screw

Day six: We attached netting on the last five ramps

Day seven: We finished the screw

Day eight: We worked on the pulley

Day nine: We worked on the pulley again