Final Design

Our final design is pictured below, as you can see from the beginning solid model we did not deviate much from our original ideas to our final product. one thing we did change was how we opened and closed the flap of the machine instead of using an arm attached to the flap we used bevel gears directly connected to the flap and the motor. This worked to our advantage because we did not have to deal with long moment arms creating large torques on the motor.

The final design started with aluminum tubing that was cut into four pieces two sides and two cross members to attach the sides too these were all made using the mill. To secure all of these members together we used right angle brackets with nuts and bolts which made it easy to assemble. On top of the frame was an acrylic plate which we cut using the laser cutter. This allowed us to mount the motors and control box on top of our machine. We also had a tread system on our robot this was given to us by a sponsor who was a teacher of one of the members of our team. all of the Vex components had square axels so we used that and drilled holes into our .25 inch axel rod that fit into all of the bushings. in order to secure the square axel to the round axel we drilled pin holes through both and put welding rod through the holes to secure them. The final component of our machine was the flap which was our MCM. We mounted this and opened it with bevel gears attached to the polulu motor which had very high torque and would allow us to keep balls in our machine.

This is the link to our final bill of materials and total costs. http://goo.gl/zxDSd