Introduction: |
For this project we were required to design a machine that sorted 15 marbles (5 plastic, 5 wooden, and 5 metal). For every error that occurred while sorting a 30 second penalty was added to the final time. We had about a month to work on this project.
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Take-a-ways: |
I had learned more from this project than I have from any other project I did in Intro. to Engineering and Principles of Engineering. In the process of this project I really learned that you can have a fantastic solution to the problem, but you may not have the full knowledge of how to make that idea work. The first marble sorter my partner and I tried involved an encoder. We had used the encoder previously on the test bed, and we were able to learn how to use it. However, for our marble sorter we were just not able to find a correct way of using the encoder. We then started over completely about 2 weeks into the project. We had planned out more in our engineering notebooks, and really thought about our design. Sadly, we were not able to get an accurate machine to sort the marbles by the end of the due date. What I had taken away the most was that sometimes it is better to fail than to succeed. What I mean by this is that I feel if we would've succeeded on the marble sorter right away we would've missed out on the great opportunities we had of problem solving. I also learned by failing that it is always better to be positive, and never talk down on your partner. By communicating my partner and I were still able to work together as a hard working team. I am okay with failing on this project because it had taught me many life lessons that I will be able to apply for the rest of my life.
To the right is a slideshow of the coding packets we had used to perfect our coding.
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To the right is another slide show of pictures from the marble sorter.
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To the right is a slideshow of the packets we had used for our coding. Due to the large amounts of pages I had just included the cover page.