Prototyping and Making the Flipper

By Jayesh, Omar, Darshan

Task: Design an apparatus to deposit the climbers in the beacon bucket.

One of the methods to score in this year's competition is depositing the two climbers in the bucket behind the beacon. This being relatively simple, we decided to concentrate this practice on creating something to get us these easy points. We discussed possible ways to deposit the climbers and came up with a design that used some of the scoring mechanism we already had on our robot. The idea was to have a long thin, box-shaped platform to hold our two climbers and have it held down by bungie cords. Using the spinning motion of our churro catchers, we would release the cords holding down the platform and thus releasing the potential energy created from the cords. This would cause our boxes to incline down and the climbers to slide down into the bucket.

Reflections

After finishing our thoughts on the design, we first measured out the minimum space required to hold our two climbers. Then, we added a little extra to each of our dimensions to allow for error in the down motion of the climbers. First making a prototype made our of cardboard, this allowed us to test if our idea actually worked. Then, with the errors fixed using our prototype, we made our actual platform using the prototype as a base model out of plastic. Then we attached our metal platform to hold it over our top center beam and shaved off the top edge of the platform to keep it under the size limt. Now we have relatively easy points in the form of our climber depositing system, which will help us in our competition.