Project 2 – Lego Originality

Contents

Introduction

Hi, welcome to my Project 2 Robotics and Mechanics Blog! In this blog I will keep you guys posted with every thing I do to create my second project. This project is a summative assessment which I will take more seriously that my first Project, which was on SumoBot or stairclimber which I chose SumoBot. As the first project, it was a given assignment that we had to do SumoBot or Stairclimber however on Project 2, we can do anything we want. Thats right, Lego Originality. This Project seems much more serious and is more serious than the first one, it will probably take more than 13 classes to finish the final product, but I think we will have more time than that. This project will be done in partners and it is not an individual project. For this project I chose Matteo as he really wanted to work with me because he has less experience with legos compared to others in the class. Although he does get distracted sometimes, if I give him this chance to work with me, I think that he will do what is expected. I am currently thinking about what my next project should be about. A few things I have in mind are Monorail, Train, Dumpster truck, ski lift and a coin exchanger (parody of money exchange). My goal was to add some kind of different mechanism to my project like the air pumping, which is my goal for this project, but may not be achieved depending with what I end up with.

Journal

Day 1: On day one, me and Matteo thought of an idea on what to build. At the beginning, we chose the topic of a vending machine however, things did start to change after the first class. Once we decided that we were going to do a vending machine, we first drew our prototype and the major mechanisms that this project will require on a piece of paper. I will post a picture below of what me and Matteo drew and what I drew. Our first concept that if we put the bill inside the slot, the ultrasonic sensor will let the conveyor belt move and then there will a be a temporary platform to sense the bill and then the light sensor will tell which motor to drop down of the barrier for the storage. There was one big problem, the whole project could only be used once then needed to be modified.

Day 2: On day two, me and Matteo went to look at how the major mechanisms of other vending machinery to get an idea of how we could solve the problem. We had to use the swirl to lock up the food then when the light sensor senses, it swirls one rotation. The hardest part was making the tubing and the gearing/mechanism we would use for the storage of the food, which we ended up then switching our project to a money exchanger. This period, we got our money exchanger drawn prototype approved right before class ended. During break I ended up building the platform of our project.

Day 3: Today we needed to check with Ms.law about our project again because we needed to clarify what parts matteo would do and what parts I would do. We also needed to tune up the last bits of our major mechanism on how we would build our project. Towards the end half of the class, we got into building and Matteo built one of his sliders whilst I was still building my conveyor belt. They way that we split it out was that, Matteo would do the output and I would do the input, however, his was easier so we made a deal that once he finishes he would start helping me.

Day 4: Today I started to build my project. I wasn’t sure which gears I should use for this project so I started using two medium gears to start off with. As some problems existed, I knew that time was limited and that I should just keep building and solve the problems later. Today I just continued to build the base of the conveyor belt and test some of the mechanisms for the gearing. By the end of the class I had the conveyor belt don’t with no input or storage which was my starting block. There were still many mechanical problems which I left for the next class. The brick wasn’t long enough so I had to undo the whole thing and place all the axels in one set of long brick. This class matteo was figuring his own mechanisms and starting to build it too.

Day 5: Today at the beginning of the class I was figuring how to solve the mechanisms of the project instead of using 2 medium gears on top of each other continually because it was unstable and weren’t touching each other. It was so unstable that it didn’t even work running backwards. I looked at my bin or lego pieces inside my block and realised by adding an idler in the middle the whole thing would be much better. This problem will be described in the problems section. I also figured out where was the best positioning for the motors which will also be described below in the problems section. Towards the end of this class I had created the storage with leaving only the light sensor and the input for next class. By the end of the class, matteo had finished his first slider that was pretty good, his next job was to make another one of this.

Day 6: Today I mainly focused on building the input with I knew would at least take the whole class to build as it is very challenging to make. Whilst building it at the beginning I thought that I would have to use some kind of mechanisms to make both wheels to go in opposing direction at the same time so that the bill can go through it smoothly. After I built it I started with gears to test it out however I found that there didn’t need to be a kind of gearing through the input because the wheels were already touching. Friction allowed them to move at the opposing direction. It was also really hard to add a type of gearing as there was limited space between the input and the conveyor belt. By the end of class I had finished the input and just had the light sensor to add on top of the conveyor belt. Adding this was very tough, I will describe how i did this. This was because whenever I put the light sensor on the axle it would just slip down.