Joseph Elghoul Reflection

                This course has been the most important part of my engineering education thus far. I feel that topics covered and activities engaged will be very relevant in my future career. All the aspects of the class from the actual design and manufacturing to working with a team and make decisions taking multiple ideas into the thinking.  Topics covered in lecture also helped with thinking about the basic things to think about in the design process.

                The design and manufacturing portions of this class were the most enjoyable from my perspective. This was the first course I have taken that gave me experience with a CAD program. That CAD program was Solidworks that became a necessary tool in the design of our machine. The way Solidworks was taught was done very efficiently in that different steps were taught to us that we later would piece together. Using a CAD program in designing our machine before any actual machining anything allowed our group to know almost every detail of our machine from the very beginning. This allowed us to anticipate problems and told us much more about a proposed design than a simple sketch would. Not only was this my first experience with a CAD program but this course also was my first experience with machining on this class. The machine shop was somewhere where once I got a handle of different processes and the functions of different machines I became very efficient with my time. Total machining time would definitely be a fraction of the original time spent when I was still learning how to use the machine. The machine training was a very rough and brief introduction to the machines. For example, when it comes to my personal experience with the lathe, I needed to go through the same process at least three times until I felt comfortable that I was doing things correctly. Repetitive experience was the only way I learned while in the machine shop. Reading instructions off a paper and going through the physical motions were very different things.

                The experience I had with my team was a very favorable one. I was lucky to be in a group where the members were accountable and productive. What was different about this team is that more true than other groups I’ve been in, certain members had certain training. Using the knowledge of who knew how to do what is how we distributed the work among the team members. This was especially true when it came to the machine shop where we tried to keep the same people working with the same machines so that we were well experienced with whatever process we were performing. The team used our time wisely and we met all deadlines. Once again, stating that our group was very productive and there wasn’t the case of harassing a member to get something done that he was being lazy on, it did not happen on team Highrollers.

                Lecture was an effective tool in that it familiarized us with the science behind what we were producing. It was not only relevant to our machine but I feel since it was so basic it will apply to future things I will design in my engineering future. When lecture spoke about different things to reduce friction and deciding on which material will work best in particular situations are tools that are universal to all design processes.

                Overall this course was very valuable and educational to me as a result of the work of the professors, my GSI, and my team members. This course was more enjoyable than most courses and should not be altered too much if at all. Although my team did not fair too well in the competition, the process was educational, positive, and most of all, memorable.

Final Reflections

Hey Everyone,

Just want to let you all know that Colin and I have both posted our final reflection in the important links on the side. Check it out if you want!

Final Bill of Materials

Here is the link to the final Bill of Materials as a Google doc.

Mario's Reflection

Bloggers,

It's been an exciting semester for the High Rollers. We laughed, we cried, we ate Panda Express, and we engineered.  Although our tragic elimination early in the competition was disappointing, we are grateful to our fans all over the world for their support throughout this Balltower season.

The design process was not an easy one, to say the least.  We went through several concepts and faced more than a few obstacles and had to adjust strategies and designs to overcome them.  One of the main things I think I learned about the design process is the importance of building/prototyping as early as possible.  While fine tuning our design we thought about as many factors as we could but when you have an idea of how a system is supposed to work, it is easy to think everything will work out how it should instead of thinking about how components may not interact the way you want them to or something may just not work at all.  Getting feedback from outside perspectives through design reviews and meetings with Serge did help us consider many things we didn't on our own and we were able to identify and address some of these issues.  Our original ball collection design, which relied on hinged acrylic flaps stopping the balls from rolling out from under our machine, would not have been able to retain control of the balls as we drove off the hill due to their size.  We adjusted our design for this and made immobile front flaps to keep the balls under control while we drove back onto the level surface of the field.   We faced a major setback on the first day we were able to actually test our machine when we realized our single front axle design seriously inhibited the maneuverability of our machine and a miscalculation in our collection arm design limited our ability to execute the original strategy of getting the red squash balls from the top of the hill.  I'm confident these are 2 issues we would have been more than able to handle but were just discovered too late for us to properly fix them.  Luckily our arm design did still allow us to collect balls from the ground level of the arena as well as reach the black balls on the hillside.  The former became our final strategy for the competition.

I think our team worked together very well.  We had regular meetings for planning and working on assignments prior to manufacturing and very effectively compartmentalized tasks to most efficiently complete our work on time.  We didn't have any real issues with time management, we all held each other accountable and were responsible about getting our work done.  We developed good team chemistry pretty early on which really helped us have good communication and made meetings and collaboration more enjoyable.

The lectures for the course definitely had a lot of valuable information and a lot of it helped with our machine design.  I think there were times where I felt a disconnect with the lectures and lab and it was hard to tell what material was being emphasized in lecture as being important. I think homework assignments or practice problems similar to questions that would later be on the exam would have helped focus our studying and emphasized relevant information.

I think I put in a good amount of time and effort into the course. An area where I could have improved would have been studying more for the exam and making sure I had a better grasp of all the material from lecture although the review sessions and office hours were very helpful.

Overall, this was a good course. At least for me, it was the first class I had where I was able to go through the entire engineering design and manufacturing process and I think it was a good introduction.  I'm excited to continue on and tackle more complicated design problems in courses to come.


Peace out,
Mario

Design Expo

Hey Bloggers,

Just wanted to recap on how the design expo went. Judging by how well we did during lab on Wednesday, we should have beat our opponent during round 0 since we were seeded higher than them. Unfortunately, we ended up losing 3 ping pong balls to 2. Our strategy had changed again to knock the balls out of the bottom of the tower and try to knock them in our goal by driving into them with our machine. If you want to see the pics of our final machine, just go to the previous post.

High Rollers Video

Hey Bloggers,

Here is the official release of the High Rollers video for the design expo. Enjoy!

High Rollers Machine

Hey Bloggers,

The High Rollers have officially finished our machine. We were able to test our machine in lab today and we made some modifications to it. We also applied the velcro to our machine for the battery pack. First of all we changed our strategy to knock off the black balls instead of knocking off the red balls. We changed up the strategy because our machine isn't able to turn on the ledge and drive straight along the ledge. Our machine is able to drive along the base and knock off the black balls though so fortunately we had that as a backup strategy to make our main strategy. We had a number of modifications we made to our machine.

The first modification we made to our machine was while we were testing it. We took off the sand paper on the front wheels because our machine can't turn with the sand paper on them.

The second modification we made went along with the first. Our machine didn't have enough traction with just the sand paper so we decided to put the rubber bands on to help our machine from slipping on the arena. I don't think it had enough traction in the first place because it wasn't heavy enough. But adding more weight would be bad for our strategy, so we had to improvise.

Another modification we made was putting rubber padding underneath the motors. It was to correct for a height difference between our motors and our pillow blocks/ arm mounts. It also cushions the chassis from motor vibrations. We also put rubber padding between the flaps and the chassis. We did this because the flaps rotate too far out and after we put rubber padding between the two it corrects for the problem.

Our final modification was to correct for the squash balls getting stuck underneath our chassis. We corrected this problem by taking copper wire and putting beads on it, and placing this underneath the chassis. It helps the balls roll more smoothly while preventing them and our machine from getting stuck.