Week 3 Progress Summary

During the week of November 18-22 team Rubber Band Gunner met on Wednesday, November 20, and Thursday, November 21. All team members were present at both meetings.

Before team meetings each member worked individually to brainstorm ideas for the overall mechanism. With the gear already designed, a base to hold the gear and servo motor, and an arm to launch the rubber bands needed to also be designed. Each member spent roughly one hour on individual work.

Wednesday meeting: Team Rubber Band Gunner met from 2pm to 4:30pm in Perry 321. During this meeting, the team finalized the design of our mechanism's gear, which is planned to be fabricated. The team also brought together individual designs and created all other parts of the mechanism on SolidWorks (listed in previous post). Some parts were used from grabcad.com, while others were created from scratch in SolidWorks (specified in previous post). The decision was made to attach the gear to a servo horn on the servo motor using adhesive, rather than cut a hole in the gear to fit on the servo motor. Also, the team decided to angle the top of the launching arm in order to avoid the rubber bands hitting the mechanism's arm as they launch. Finally, the team created an assembly in SolidWorks using all of the parts (displayed in previous post).

Thursday meeting: Team Rubber Band Gunner met from 4pm to 5:30pm in Perry 321. During this meeting, the team created a motion analysis of the assembly in SolidWorks that was created in the previous meeting. In the motion analysis, the servo motor rotates, causing the servo horn and gear to also rotate which would launch rubber bands over the launching arm, or prepare the mechanism to reload. The team also discussed intentions for next week.

For next week, the team plans to fabricate the gear that was created. Also, the team plans to update the mechanism's Arduino code, since the code for the mechanism has not been updated since week 2. The code is expected to allow the LCD screen to display "RELOAD" when the servo motor resets to its initial position.