Hey there, fans of ME 250!
So it's all said and done, and ME 250 is over. Time flies, eh?
So Thursday was the Design Expo, and --unfortunately--we ran into some technical difficulties regarding our machine. We had seeded ourselves into the exact center of the competition bracket (and therefore earned ourself the slightly degrading "Most Average" award), and were pitted against Stiga. Unfortunately, just before testing, we discovered that our machine had been hurt in transit, and the planetary gearbox attached to our arm rotation axle wasn't working.
After competing in a very unexciting first round where no balls were actually moved, we were deemed the winning team because we were the closer of the two teams to actually scoring. Unfortunately, to compete in the next round, we would have had to take a planetary gearbox off of another team's machine to replace ours. Because of the way we had modified our gearbox coupling, however, we would have also had to exchange our coupling onto the new motor, which proved to be impossible because of the spring pin used to attached the coupling. The correct tools to remove this pin weren't available at the design competition, so this issue could not be resolved. For this reason, we were forced to forfeit our second round of play and were removed from the competition.
Despite this unfortunate turn of events, we still believe that we manufactured a simple design which could have been effective had it not been for our unfortunate breakage incident. We put in hours and hours of work into our design and manufacturing, and we are happy that we completed a workable prototype. Thanks to Sei Jin and all of fellow lab section 004ers--it was fun!
Have a safe and happy winter break, everyone!
Team 42
Figure 1: Our tiny cart prepares to battle Stiga's massive machine.
Figure 2: Dan readies our cart on the competition arena.
Figure 3: Adam and Dan are excited for the competition!
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