How our project was made:

How we started:

Our initial design was a claw machine constructed with a gantry system made out of aluminium extrudes. Additionally, we planned on having a rotating claw head with three different heads.

Our lo-fidelity prototype had minimal physical components. We had designs for many of the parts we planned to use, but the structure of our actual project was almost non-existent. The only part we had was a preliminary design for our claw.

Improvements

Our Hi-Fidelity Prototype.

We had the entire gantry system constructed with working X and Z-axis motors. However, we were still working on getting the dropper mechanism and the claw to function as intended.

For our dry run:

Around this point, we changed from the idea of a rotating claw head to a single claw, and upgraded the current claw head to pick up objects better. We had made minor improvements to the structure and had every part of our project working relatively well. However, we still needed to improve our consistency. Our claw was also not able to pick up the balls, so we needed another claw head redesign.

The day of the museum visit:

When we brought the project to the museum, we expected to have our project fully working, albeit with potential complications that could be quickly accounted for.

A picture of our whole project.

However, our Raspberry Pi Pico fried once we got to the museum and we had to improvise. We used the claw head and a spare Arduino in order to make a working game.

Our dissasembled project.

Overall, our project required advanced Solidworks CAD, 3D printing, python coding, and soldering throughout the entire project. Since our project was extremely technical, most of the time we spent on the project was devoted to prototyping. As a whole, we spent most of our time on the project attempting to make it function - while at the end, everything worked semi-competently, some other parts of our project, such as consistency or decor suffered. We are proud of what we have made, and although we suffered setbacks the entire way, we don't regret the time we spent on our project.

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