This was probably my favorite class this semester. I enjoyed that this course allowed us to take all the knowledge and experience we’ve accumulated in our lives and finally apply it. The hands on aspect of the class was great and taught me a lot. I think the biggest thing this class teaches any of us is the distinct difference between designing something, and manufacturing it and bringing it to life. The main offender in this turned out to be not double checking each other’s measurements. There were several cases where we accepted or assumed a value, and when we got to manufacturing and assembly, came to realize we had to change several dimensions. Otherwise, we had things pretty sorted out when we finished the design phase. During manufacturing, it may have been the horrible lack of sleep, but the saying “anything that can go wrong, will” proved to be all too true for us. The few things that slipped past our attention and weren’t completely settled tended to blow up and cause more problems as we had to change things. This gave me further experience with handling problems on the fly, in less than ideal situations.
We designed a timing circuit to operate our roller and eliminate it as a controlled degree of freedom and allow it to spin during the match then shut off at the end. This circuit was an interesting experience, and has reinforced my decision not to be involved in the EECS world. It was cool, but I’m glad we finished it. Because some of the control modules apparently leak current to the motors despite no input from the controller, our tests of the circuit before and during seeding showed us it would trigger unprovoked. Because of this, we elected not to power the timing circuit during competition because we worried the roller would be more likely to cause our disqualification than it would help us. The roller was positioned to just barely touch the top of the balls, and it was powered through rubber bands on pulleys, so we were able to operate without the roller spinning. We did, however, decide to drive with the circuit running, after the final match, and were pleased to see that it operated as designed, though frustrated that we never used it in competition (a short clip of it is posted below).
Our team functioned very well together. We all got along, and were able to all contribute positively to the design and manufacturing of the project. We all stuck together and helped out during our disasters and worked to achieve our goal. We all remained focused and motivated through our endeavor and were pleased with how it turned out.
Something I would change for the future, would be having a central location for all assignment related notices, information, and links. It was very difficult to find information that I knew existed somewhere on the ctools site. It was especially difficult and time consuming to find links and important information that were essentially buried in the lecture slides.
Given the opportunity to do it again, I would probably elect a simpler design, as the detail in our design caused us to spend a lot more time working on it than a simpler design would have. Fewer small parts to machine and grind would have been a good choice. One major thing I would change to improve would definitely be getting more sleep. Also probably would have pushed the schedule further up to allow for more testing and diagnosing of problems. As a result, our defensive “decepticon” module was not as effective as we had planned, due to what we have agreed upon to be the result of minimal weight over the wheels, resulting in very little friction, and far too much resistance resulting from the length of the wire to its motors robbing them of power.
Thank you to my teammates on team Fluffy Bunny, for making this a solid experience, and thank you to the ME 250 staff for making it a fun, informative class.
-Marcus Brown
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