Rube Goldberg Machine Portfolio

Our Winter Wonderland Themed Rube Goldberg Machine

Mission of the project

The Rube Goldberg Machine (RGM) Project was a team-based design split between our classes. The goal of the class was to create one large RGM by connecting all of the groups machines together. Our section chose a "winter wonderland" theme, so everyone got to use holiday/winter themed materials.

Our group's personal goal was to connect our machine to the group before and after us, and create a machine that worked with no interventions. To start our machine, the group before us had a ball on a track that fell into a chimney for our machine. At the end of our section, we had a ball roll down a track and into a cup on a pulley of the group after us.

As a class, we got the opportunity to demonstrate our completed RGM at the Northeastern Engineering Expo on December 5th. This portfolio is designed to showcase our completed project and the progress we made throughout the term.

What Our Machine Does

Here is a flowchart depicting how our machine works in our final design. Over the course of the project it has been changed and edited constantly as we realized ideas wouldn't work through prototype testing and came up with different steps that we implimented and tested.

The Proposed Idea

To the left is a diagram of what we submitted for our project proposal. Every single part of the diagram was altered in some manner from the proposal to our final design. For instance, before even our first prototype, we realized that dominos would be too inconsistent and take too long to set up to work.

Our First Prototype

After presenting our project proposal, we decided to make some changes to the our machine. Originally, we wanted to build a tower out of Legos and use a servo motor to knock over a line of dominos that would trigger the third step of our machine that involves a zipline. Instead, we decided to have the servo pull a penguin on a track up a ski hill made out of cardboard. The servo would pull our penguin over the end of the ski hill to trigger the ski lift on the zipline. This change made our section of the machine more cohesive with the winter wonderland theme and also made it easier for us to find materials to use while build. Excluding dominoes from the design will also make set-up times faster and this portion of the machine will also be more reliable across all runs.

Our dry run during class helped us to understand the next steps for our project. We needed to replace our broken servo motor with a working motor that has 360 degrees of rotation and add it to the code, tweak our transitions with the team before and after us and start polishing the aesthetics and repeatability of the machine.

Our Second Prototype

After the first prototype, we made many changes to the electronics in our project. We added a touch sensor that is triggered by the penguin travelling up the ski slope, which then turns on a 180 servo motor, which releases the ski lift down the zipline. We also added a normal motor, which reels the penguin up the slope from behind. These changes allowed the machine to flow more seamlessly through steps and made a lot of sections easier to manage and build.

Additionally, we made adjustments in order to fit the theme better and to make our section more compatible with the groups before and after us. We had to shorten the chimney in order to make the transition from group B easier. We also changed the cups that held the final ball in place to a stack of wrapped gifts to strengthen the holiday vibe. After this in class demonstration, our immediate next step was fix an problem we have with the motor on the ski slope where the string will occasionally move off the track. We also wanted to find a more reliable way for the soil sensor to get triggered by the previous team's ball.

Motor and Driver

A specific change we made from our first prototype to our second was the use of a motor and motor driver instead of a servo. This allowed us to continually spin and reel in a string where we were having issues with before.

Our Project Mascot

To go along with the Winter Wonderland theme, we incorporated this penguin toy into our machine. He gets pulled up a large slope by a string that is wound around a reel spun by our motor.

Our Final Design and Expo Performance

Since the dry run, we had the chance to make changes and add final touches to our Rube Goldberg Machine. To fix a string from falling off the reel that pulled the penguin up the slope from stopping, we reinforcing the reel with hot glue. This change makes it so the string does not move off the track. Additionally, we added more decorations to the ski lift component of our machine to cover the PVC pipes. We added more decorative paper and cotton balls to complete the decorating of our machine. While our design did not succeed at first, we ended it with a great successful sequence of events during the final performance.

Our AutoCAD Drawing

Pseudocode for Soil Sensor and Motor

Psuedocode for Touch Sensor and Servo

It begins with similar code to set up the libraries and pins with/for the components, and enters a while loop. In this case, it continuously tests if the soil sensor is above a certain threshold of moisture, which in this case is activated by the soil sensor being knocked into the cup of liquid. That then sets a variable to the time before entering a loop that starts turning a motor to wind a penguin up a hill, continuously checking the current time until 4 seconds have elapsed, then stopping it.

The code begins by importing the libraries to process the functions for the components and sleeping the program, and then assigns the necessary pins and frequencies for the pico kit to process the components commands. A duty cycle is assigned that represents the position for the motor to be in, and then a while true loop is initialized, continuously setting the motor to its base position and moving it to its halfway point to release the ski lift when the touch sensor is pressed and then back again, repeating until the code is stopped

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Conclusion and Reflection

The Rube Goldberg Machine allowed us, as first-year engineering students, to experience the engineering-design process first-hand. We had to learn how to revise ideas if they were not working, how to work as a team, and with other teams, and how to make an idea on paper into something tangible. It was also a good way to apply the material we have learned throughout the semester into a physical project, helping us understand the real-world applications of the engineering curriculum.

Overall, we were satisfied with how the end result of our project looked after all the time we put into it, and had an enjoyable time throughout the semester bringing it to life.

The Team

Cooper Thornell, Elle Gys, Katie Tomasello, Brodie Newhouse

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