It's Alive!

Hey, there, fans of ME 250!

So although our machine is certainly not "alive", we did have some fantastic news coming out of this week--our MCM moves! Our cart and axles are completely assembled including pillowblocks, bushings, and our dual gearbox drive motor to power the front axles. When we connected the dual gearbox to the power source to demonstrate our module to Sei Jin, it actually drove forward (very slowly but powerfully, just as we had intended)! Our machine certainly won't be a speed demon, but hopefully it will be somewhat stealthy and tank-like.

In other news, we also completed our "All Engineering" (AE) assignment this week. We've now finished designing every part of our machine, and we're ready to machine everything starting this week. After our MCM, we actually only had one module remaining--the arm with its driving and winch axles. After some new analysis and changes to our original design, we finally settled on the module setup shown in Figure 1 below. We'll let you know how machining is going next week!

What we have left to do:

-machine all arm PVC parts

-machine axles for arm and winch

-assemble machine and configure planetary gearbox motors

-test machine

Hope you all had a safe and happy Thanksgiving! See you in a week...

Team 42

PS: Interested to see how our schedule has changed? Click here for more information on our current plan!

Figure 1: Completed CAD assembly for All Engineering assignment.

Figure 2: 3 very excited members of Team 42 show off our completed MCM.

Figure 3: Dan's thumb approves of the completed MCM!