After reading the feedback presented by last semesters slot teams, I knew that this class would require a significant amount of time and dedication. That being said I was still somewhat caught off guard even though the long hours spend working on our machine were probably more due to our design then the layout of the competition. As we progressed through the semester there were feelings of excitement mixed with dread, but in the end I felt that the experience as a whole was worthwhile and rewarding.
In the design and manufacturing phase, I enjoyed the classes on CAD. I had been meaning to learn how to use CAD software for a while now, and the CAD process as a whole was very helpful for designing and visualizing the vehicle. A downside of using CAD was how it made the design process almost to easy, once the vehicle was started in CAD the complexity of the design sort of got out of hand. I believe that our team already had a general understanding of the existence of all the mechanisms covered in the lectures, but the lectures were still useful in the way that they refreshed our memory of all the mechanisms that we could incorporate into our design.
With regards to manufacturing, I believe that everything went relatively smoothly. Our team knew that we had quite a few parts to complete, and we had things planed out way in advance. Problems did still arise such as slight alignment issues with the table, and failure in some of our bought components, but because we had given excess time in our schedule we were able to finish on time. The only thing I was disappointed with was our ability to run practice tests on the table and fine tune things in the end. With only two tables and four remotes with 28 teams though, I’m sure many teams were experiencing the same issue.
Overall, I was very pleased with the strong teamwork in our group. Every time we had a group meeting everyone would show up to the best of their ability. Rather then assign set roles, group members would step up and take on certain tasks. The rest of the group would then discus and critique the result so that we would have a solid finished project.
If I were to redesign the machine, I would make numerous changes. Our design was focused around the fact that we would gather up all the balls on the top of the table. In hindsight this is an incredibly unrealistic feat to accomplish in 90 seconds. Overall, the strength of the machine’s components were significantly stronger then they needed to be. This lead to a heavy vehicle with a slow rate of translation as the double gearbox was unable to over come this. Despite the disappointing performance by the double gearbox, I was happy with the performance of the flipper and the hopper release. The machine easily gathered up all three types of balls if only we could get the vehicle to them.
With regards to the competition, there were a few things that I thought could be improved upon. Most of the teams could have performed significantly better if they had a week of testing to make slight modifications to their machines. In addition I believe that the overall time of the competition rounds should be lengthened. When I first envisioned the game, I thought that most of the balls would be collected. Except for Team Boss which had a very effective and well built design, no other teams came close to bringing in large amounts of balls.
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