9/2/14 First post on the JPL invention challenge
Today students heard about the JPL Invention challege and now are starting
to think about what they want to do and how to approach the challenge.
Here is the Official JPL Invention Challenge Rules.
9/5/14
Students presented what they thought the JPL invention challenge was and what their ideas on
it were. Mr. Wilton joined us and he gave us his perspective on the challenge.
9/12/14
Today the JPL Invention challenege people talked about their device that used either bungees/springs, gravity, or
other to get the billard ball from the beginning to make the noise 5 meters away. Mr. Wilton also joined
us to give his advice on what he thought about the devices.
For 4th period, after the group presented they went into the programming cave and talked through
their device with Mr. Wilton. He talked about the change in the distance between the two bars
that they had and he talked about the slant that the competition field could possibly be created on.
He asked them to create a small version of their 5 meter device and take the difference in the times
from multiple slopes.
9/17 9/18 9/22
The group worked on creating the device that Mr. Wilton said to build and they took multiple times from different
slopes. After they took slopes from a level surface in the shop they went outside to the rally platform
and compared the data to some they took there on a 4* sloped surface.
9/23/14
I worked with the group a bit more today and started to get them to come up with some concepts of what
to do with the challenge. By the end of the period there was a decent design created and now to
add the details. Here are pictures of our designs on the whiteboards.
10/13/14
This is a bit late but I still want to add these in because it's some of the records that we used to test
what we wanted to do.
These are the scores from the first test we did with the two bars and bungees.
These are the ratios we got from the tests on both a level surface and an unlevel surface.
10/24/14
This is late but last week we had a meh presentation to Mr. Wilton. We need to get ontop of our game and start our
final device. Prototypes are being created and here is the ball proto with Alice.
Trying to figure out how to show the video but here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1cBri8suo&feature=youtu.be
James and Ian are working on the spring prototype and are almost competed with that. I would like to push to be
finished with all prototypes by the end of next week and have our final design done.
Then we'll start and finsh our finalized device.
10/28/14
So today was a tough day. I talked to Dr. Neat more about how he would of liked us to run our device or the process of
building it and sadly we just do the bare minimum to get by. So now we are cut off on funding. It was a completely logical
reason why and I totally get it. It's just like if a company is deciding who to invest in, they'd go for someone with
reliability and who will follow a certain protocol. Creating a thorough design before starting the finalized project.
We're working with it and I totally think we can get through it. Today I worked a bit with Kyle on the equation for
how we are going to decide how fast the ball goes through the belts. That math was so much fun to think about.
Going through each step one by one and thinking out what would happen was great. I think we ended with the equation:
((~6.5)(RPM/1m))/(20-t)
The rest of the groups I believe are doing well, spring has an idea and Ian brought something in to make it easlier.
Eric, Shea, and Ryan are working on how our device will cut in three segments and attach again.
