Over the last two weeks we have made really amazing progress towards our final project. My main focus has been going through many iterations of the physical design, testing, and refining. The design for the launcher is fully made of parts to be laser cut so it is really easy to iterate on and quick to fabricate. The design we have landed on incorporates two plates to mount the motors. The second was necessary to mitigate the strong vibration that was introducing a lot of uncertainty in our shots. Another large change we made while iterating on our physical prototypes was the choice to angle the motors themselves, rather than have a ramp that would come after the straight motors. This made many aspects of the launcher much simpler, especially our loading mechanism. We found that having as little interference as possible after the ball leaves the wheels was the best way to increase consistency in our launches.
Test of our slide loading system:
Earlier test of just the launching mechanism:
With the aiming done, all we need to do to integrate the launcher with the aiming is to screw the base of the unit into the stepper motor shaft. Our immediate focus right now is to get our consistency higher. We are going to fabricate one last version of the launcher, along with a mount. As it stands, we have enough control to aim for the back of the formation vs the front, but not enough to distinguish between the individual rows. A lot of this is from the vibration and the fact that it isn’t yet secured in the housing and should be remedied in the final assembly. Even as it is now, we had a few of our friends toss balls at the same formation and they were about as accurate as our project, if not a little bit worse. It’s really exciting to see everything finally come together.