Mini Sculptures

Requirements

One User Input (Button, Knob, Potentiometer)
One Sensor
One Actuator
- All programmed by NXT, Arduino, etc

Our team is building these mini sculptures in order to help prepare us for the full final sculptures, and give us insight on what can be and cannot be done within our sculptures. It allows us to enter the final project with a clear basis on what we want to do and how we can execute it.

Design Concepts

Our mini sculpture contains a unqiue variety of designs within it, but the most prominent feature of our mini sculpture is the plinko section of the tracks! Inspired by the fun plinko machines, our team wanted to implement the same euphoric feeling you'd get from an arcade, in our mini sculpture! Additionally, the user input for this track comes into play during the ball's descent into the plinko machine. Since the dropper has multiple bumpers that alter the marble's course, a motor with a ball catcher ran by the NXT sits at the bottom of the plinko machine, moving back and forth continuously to catch the marble. This action can be interrupted by the user pressing left and right buttons which alter the ball catcher's course. Furthermore, at the start of the mini sculpture, the marble passes through a speed sensor and drops into a cage, which is then signaled by the speed sensor to turn the cage 180 degrees. This creates an opening for the marble to fall through, which lands on the mini sculpture's windmill. The windmill then launches the ball onto the plinko section, allowing the user to prepare to catch the marble.

Plinko Machine

Windmill

Pugh Chart

The Basket Catcher was scrapped, due to it's boring appearance

Coding Flowchart

The code consists of three parts, one for each mechanism in the mini-sculpture
First starts the windmill motor
Then it waits for the ball to pass through the motion sensor, then moves the arm, carrying the ball to another track
Finally, it starts the automatic cart motor which can also be overridden by manual user input

Analysis & Results

The analysis we did to validate our windmill and plinko designs were based on the Working Model 2D simulations our team conducted. As seen below in the WM2D videos, both designs are successfully made, although multiple tweaks had to be made for a smaller margin of error.

plinko.mp4

Plinko WM2D

windmill.mp4

Windmill WM2D

Untitled1.mp4

Moving Arm WM2D

Final Mini Sculpture Design

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