Today the MarBlam! team worked late into the night, but in the end we prevailed. The prototype successfully guided the marble through the maze! The first video is a successful operation of the toy. The second video is of a failed attempt, but nicely illustrates how the toy is operated.

Week 9 The Machine

 This is the Machine. The Machine is the part of the toy that will not be seen when the 3D top is put on it but it is the most important part of the project. It puts the pulleys, motors, and lego supports together to create one machine that works the entire toy.

Week 8 Lathed Pulleys

The actuation of the maze surface is being performed by stepper motors. The stepper motors are themselves connected to levers that will physically manipulate the maze surface. These levers are connected to each other and to the stepper motors in a cable driven fashion. This allows the motors to be placed anywhere in the machine, which accommodates feasible packaging constraints. Another benefit of the cable driven system, especially in the prototyping phase, is the adjustability the system provides. The levers can be adjusted along the motors range of actuation against zero, or either maximum. The levers can also be positional adjusted against each other.

       To allow the stepper motors to manipulate the cable system, custom pulleys had to be machined. The pulleys retain the cable, and provide sufficient friction and moment action between the motor shaft and the cable. The pulleys were machined from available material to adequate specifications. As little thought was given to the material and non-driving dimensions of the pulleys, it is possible that future testing may reveal a need to adjust these attributes.

Week 7 New 3D Surface

We designed a new 3D surface for the top, board, section of our game. This new 3D surface was created with the idea in mind that the marble should not be able to move too fast. The surface is only going to be tilted a small amount at a time therefore this new surface should work permanently on the board. We are printing 4 pieces that we will glue onto a base to create one large board.

Week 6

This week saw a critical technical breakthrough. The chief technical difficulty of this project was the control of the marble’s linear movement to one unit space at a time. Rather than develop a method for accomplishing this, the mazes the marble would go through were redesigned to become dependent on just the opposite. The mazes now incorporate continuous linear movement in their solution patterns. These new maze structures have several other benefits as well. The maze structure, while not entirely novel, is quite unique and should add to the overall appeal of the toy. The mazes themselves are much more minimal in nature as well. This means that each maze will require much less wall structure. The mazes themselves will be much more difficult to solve by eye, increasing the number
of attempts required to solve, and the engagement of the user. 

Week 5 Motor Programming and Surface Tweeks

Since the 3D printed surface did not come out as we expected we are changing the design of the surface of the maze. This is one of the first ideas for one of the maze or puzzle surfaces. The marble will no longer have to stop at certain locations to complete the puzzle. Instead we decided to stick with the idea of letting the marble roll through the node canals until it hits a stopper. This concept makes for more interesting and different puzzles than what would be expected in traditional mazes.
.

Also Nick has been working with the motors that will be used to tilt the board different ways. The motors are ready to be programmed. A test code was created to test their functionality and better understand their operation for use in the final device. Next to be completed is individual coding of functions for the motors to execute commands such as "up", "down", "left", "right"; this is what the user in the final project will enter to control the platform

Week 4 3D surface

Spencer worked in TinkerCAD to develop a model for the surface of the toy. The design uses ridges on a flat surface to hopefully create a path for the marble to easily maneuver through. The 3D printing process takes a while even for such a small design.

This is the TinkerCAD model shown above after it has been successfully printed. It came out looking exactly like the model however the marble did not move along the surface as we had hoped it would. After 4 hours of printing we are going to scrap the idea of the ridges on a flat surface and use a more basic approach for the surface. We are going to put stoppers every few centimeters so that the marble will follow a certain course.

Ben and Spencer seen building the support structure to hold the 3D printed surface of the game. They are figuring out the dimensions for the support structure. The support structure is in the beginning stages in this picture but was nearly finished at the end of the work session.

Week 3

This week has been more dedicated to the clerical progress rather than the technical progress. Much of our available time was taken up by drafting and finalizing the proposal of the project, however we did begin working on our marble control surface patterns as well as some CAD drawings of the 3D printed surface of the game. A technical development made this week was the acquisition of stepper motors to replace the servos, and supplemental control circuitry to run said stepper motors.

Week 2

The group identified our project goals and our product. We then began to outline our developmental cycle, identifying key milestones we needed to accomplish. We finalized our initial design and began fabrication of our initial prototype.