Week 4

Throughout week four I was concentrating on getting the platform made for the blocks to fall into during the sorting of our AMS. This took a lot of time and patience to complete as little things kept on standing in the way of finishing the construction of this section.

So what i had done is continuing on from last week, I have made a triangular platform with three buckets connected on top of it the hold the blocks. The first problem that came along during the process of making this, was the fact that the heavier the platform got, the more lop-sided on side was as it was running on two gears and this meant that the gears were no longer touching. To overcome this problem I needed to again find a way to strengthen the base and design to make it strong enough to hold the gears in place. After a while of fiddling around and trying different methods, I found a way to do so.

Another problem that we had with the triangular platform was that it was hard to determine the correct amount of degrees the motor needed to turn for the blocks to fall into the right buckets after they had travelled along the conveyor belt. Daniel had played around with the different ways to do this, but it seemed to hard to get perfect as they didn't always end up in the correct position. We overcame this hurdle by scrapping the idea of the triangular platform and turning it into a circular platform divided into different sections for the different coloured blocks. After doing this we found it easier to determine how many degrees the platform was to turn in order for the correct block to go in the correct section.

Before (with Triangular Platform)

After (with Circular Platform)