1/16/09

So...I can't figure out how to post on the main blog so I am blogging here. Hi! This is Sallie(not to be confused with Allie). So today has been filled with more prototyping! After dinner we decided to begin to prototype some of our new ideas. We are afraid the windmill is going to get stuck or not work. Instead, we are thinking of using conveyor belts made out of surgical tubing. Annie, Shreya (did I spell that right), divya, and I started to prototype a conveyor belt. While grooving to some jack johnson music, we determined that rather than have circular pully/sticks/track/the thing that the belt goes on, a multi-faceted surface tended to grip the belt better. Basically, we took some 80/20 and put this scratchy sandpaper tape for extra friction and used surgical tubing for the belt. We also tried to saw/file the sides down to make sides; it didn't turn out to grippy enough. Finally, we got a prototype that kinda worked. Next, we ran a lap around the circle and came back to make a prototype out of the ball-put-er-out-er. We decided that we might need to make our base of our robot a little shorter in order to allow the put-er-out-er to sucessfully get the ball in the trailer. Oh! we got the trailer today! It is a work of art. We hopefully are getting 3 more orbit balls from north carolina! So other things that happened today: toby was being amazing and de-bugging or talking with the computers as others onlooked, others were designing or measuring or planning for the robot. Ida tried to take pictures for the website. Allie was using solid works. And we all were shooting our orbit ball into our new trailer. Fun Friday!