Engineering Projects/Rube Goldberg/Howard Community College/Spring2012/p1501-ZEL

Problem Statement

To create a Rube Goldberg machine as shown in the OK Go video "This too shall pass."

Team Members

Summary

The team spent the last four weeks constructing a Rube Goldberg Machine. Ideally we would mount patches of gears from broken printers onto a board and power them with motors attached to arduinos or external power boxes. In the middle of the process, the main motor that was to be used short-circuited, and became unusable. To overcome this obstacle, the team had to figure out the wiring for another motor, which had six wires attached to its board. A third team member worked on designing different water jet prototypes. Ideally we would integrate the two.

Poster

Rube Goldberg Poster

Story

Tell a detailed story of the project. Describe how split up, what the obstacles were, what testing was done, what informal decisions were made, what assumptions were made, what the results were.

At the start of the project, the team was planning on creating a traditional Rube Goldberg machine. However, when "advised" the team decided to use printer boards, which contain many sets of gears and solenoids. The team decided that it would be best to attach the various printer boards to a sheet of plywood. When attempting to connect multiple printer boards together, the team encountered a few problems. The easiest problem to overcome was that the metal protection shields that are attached to the printer boards got in the way of two different printer boards from meshing the gears together. The team had to cut part of the metal shield off, and then sanded down the edges of the metal, so that it would not cut future students or viewers who decided they wanted to touch it. The biggest single obstacle to the whole project was when the primary motor short-circuited, rendering it useless. In order to keep moving forward, the team had to use another, older motor. This motor had six wires attached to it, so the team had to determine which wires did what. After finding this, the team was back on track.

Decision List

List all formal decisions made with links to their documentation such as a decision tree or decision matrix.

Decision Matrix for Selecting a Water Jet Design

	Simplest to Build	Conserves Water	Water Control	Total
Piano WJ	3	2	5	10
Pendulum 1 WJ	5	3	4	12
Pendulum 2 WJ	6	4	3	13
Spinning WJ	2	5	2	9
Solenoid WJ	4	1	6	11
Tube WJ	1	6	1	8

Erika

Primary Focus	Simplest to Build	Cost	Expandability	Total
Multiplier	1	1	1.5
Mechanical	3	1	2	7
Gravitational	2	3	4	11
Domino Effect	4	3	5	14.5
Mixture of All	2	2	2	7

Sam

Primary Focus	Simplest to Build	Cost	Expandability	Total
Multiplier	1	1	1.5
Mechanical	2	1	3	7.5
Gravitational	4	3	1	8.5
Domino Effect	2	2	1	5.5
Mixture of All	2	1	1	4.5

Zechariah

Material List

Currently used:

Material	Quantity	Size	Cost
Printer Gearboxes	4	Various	None (found in backroom)
Arduino	2	Small	None (found in room)
Motor	3	Medium/Small	None (found in room)
Screws/Nails	Several	Medium/Small	None (found in back room)

Future acquisitions:

Material	Quantity	Size	Cost
Tubes (metal/pvc/cardboard)	Unknown	Various	None (found in backroom)
Solenoid	Unknown	Small	None (found in room)
Power Supply 24v	Several	Medium/Large	Unknown (preferably salvaged or scavenged)
Ball	Several	small/medium	None (found in room)
Screws/Nails	Several	Medium/Small	None (found in room

Future acquisitions will vary based on what kind of devices we decide to mount and incorporate

Software List

Arduino Software installed on Laptop: allowed for the control of devices like the motor through various programs implanted on the arduino

Time

32.6 hours

Tutorials

Arduino tutorials

Guide to laser printer motor

Next Steps

The motors are now ready to go and so from now on, we would continue to mount the gears to the board and figure out how to incorporate the motor onto the board. Furthermore, we could begin to mount additional new devices and mechanisms onto the board. Also need to make the board possibly more aesthetically pleasing.