Blog Posts

Final Poster

Team FunRaiser has completed and delivered our project. We wish everyone the best!

Poster for our final design

See you later, alligators

We’re coming at you having FINISHED our machine and presented at the IPPD Final Design Review event!

Team FunRaiser and our final machine!

Shown above is the team in our Sunday best after we spent half of the day at FDR. We presented our machine personally to our liaisons from the Cade, as well as gave a formal presentation for other event attendees. Then after some delicious Reitz Union catering, we showed dozens of guests our fun machine and poster to go with.

As you can see above, we’ve got a beautiful final product! We spent a lot of crunch-time leading up to FDR getting all of the finishing touches on our machine. We think it looks fun and awesome, and it certainly got a lot of attention at FDR! There were a few components of the machine that we weren’t able to fully implement as originally designed, and it definitely wasn’t due to lack of trying—but even so, we’re proud of our Interactive Donation Machine and think it’ll be a great addition to the amazing Cade Museum of Creativity and Invention.

Solo perspective view, just to see the machine’s full glory
Closer look at the machine sequence

We’re not completely finished yet—we’re still finalizing our FDR report for the Cade, which contains everything they’d want to know about our machine, from fabrication processes to code and 3D model files and even instructions on how to extend the machine’s capabilities. Then, we’re going to be installing the final machine IN the Cade Museum, where it’ll be open to the public. So make sure to check out all of the awesome exhibits at the Cade Museum, and before you go, leave a donation through our machine to see the sequence in person!

The entire team has thoroughly enjoyed working with the Cade Museum for the past year and getting the chance to make this awesome device for all kids to enjoy. We want to once again acknowledge and thank our Cade liaisons, Carmen Hurtado, Ellie Thom, and Sydney Burge, for being extremely helpful and supportive and working with us to make our machine super fun, AND the amazing staff at the IPPD program, especially our dedicated coach and program director, Dr. Edward Latorre.

We thank you for keeping up with our progress over this past year, and we’re very excited looking to the future as each team member has great things coming up. This is Team FunRaiser, signing off!

Testing and Presenting!

The team has been working very hard to get everything finished as we near the end of the semester. Our focus has been on completing all possible aspects of our design. We worked very hard to get all of our design mounted and ready to test. We displayed our design outside of the Herbert Wertheim Laboratory for Engineering Excellence on Friday 4/21. We took surveys and got lots of feedback on the design.

Interactive Donation Machine during testing

Before testing, the above picture shows the state of our design. Over 90% of the track was completed and connected with the remaining amount ready to be mounted soon after. The electronics for the design were all working together and were only running into problems with timing the few things we needed to time. The only MOIs not fully functional were the rocket, as the friction in the system was too high for the motor to pull it all of the way across the design, and necessity, as the motor has ruin into problems moving the flowers in CJ Walker’s hair.

Displaying reaction and getting user feedback

In the coming week we will be adding finishing touches and presenting our design at the Final Design Review!

Mounting, Mounting, & Remounting

Aaron mounting the lifting mechanism

This week we are finalizing the assembly of each Mother of Invention and beginning to mount them. Running into issues with imagination, we are able to pull up the rocket just not able to bring back down. We have been going back and forth on how to mitigate this issue and think we have found a solution!

Ethan working with the electronics

Ethan has been hard at work this week, creating the circuitry for the electronics. The team is very proud of him as a lot of the things Ethan works on are very electrical engineering focused, so he is definitely working outside of his comfort zone. We are excited to see all the electronics working, but that is based on the mechanisms being mounted. So the rest of the group is working hard to get the mechanisms mounted!!

Finalizing Track & Mechanisms!

This week, we’ve focused on finishing some of the remaining pieces for the display! The flowers for CJ Walker have been painted, and the mechanism to turn the flowers has been finished and tested! All that’s left is to mount the final pieces.

Flowers for CJ Walker display

For the tubing track around the guitar, we finally received the 3D-printed tubing holders! We’ve started testing out the layout and placement of these holders, as pictured below. After testing, the exact placements will be installed into the machine!

Tubing for track around the guitar!

As for other progress this week, we’ve been doing some more work with the circuitry for the LED board and CJ Walker, a new motorized pulley was developed for the resetting mechanism, and placements were decided on for the Imagination sequence elements. See ya next week!

Prototype Inspection Day

Our prototype for PID

This week got to show off our first prototype of the machine’s sequence for Prototype Inspection Day (PID) with IPPD. We now have a sizable part of the 3D printed track mounted and demonstrated the ball rolling down and triggering some of our mechanisms. We love how our programmed light sequence turned out on the Les Paul guitar and also demonstrated our functioning slinky elevator. The light bulb sequence for Iteration is also mounted, functioning, and looks fantastic. We got a lot of useful feedback from PID, and plan to implement it as this machine continues to come together.

our creation is coming together

We’re back from a short break, and with Prototype Inspection Day approaching just next week, it’s time for us to start putting all these separate pieces we’ve 3D printed, wired, fabricated, and more, all together! Our team members have really been putting in extra hours this week pulling everything together, and we’re super excited to show it all off. Ethan has been soldering nonstop to make all of our electronics perfect—most exciting is getting our motors up and working with the rest of the systems. Meanwhile, thanks to Caitlin’s and Hannah’s efforts, we’re finally able to combine a significant portion of our track 3D prints and see the ball roll through all of them together!

An inductive proximity sensor installed in its 3D printed mount
It’s super cool to see a bunch of our 3D printed track together (plus some beautiful labels printed through the Cade)!

As always, we’re working on a dozen different things at once, with different amounts of work remaining on each. The Les Paul guitar is pretty much finished aesthetically, and is ready to be installed with its LED circuit. Meanwhile, the Archimedes screw has a bit more troubleshooting to do before we can finally install it into the machine. There’s plenty left to do, and with all hands on deck, we’re super excited to assemble the coolest interactive donation machine ever!

Testing Testing

Printing problems

This week was a very busy week for us all! This was our last week printing at the Cade Museum, so we had to make sure we got all our prints done. For the stopping mechanisms, Hannah has been designing a way to incorporate it into the track without altering the track. We were able to test her mechanism and we concluded that it worked! We have printed majority of our components, with a few pieces that we have to reprint and redesign. This week we ran into many 3d printing issues, such as some of the supporting material fusing into the actual structure along with having the infill for one of mechanisms be wrong. But overall that has made us more aware to be more careful with our placement of 3d printing. Our track has also taken some turns, with all of the track printed minus the track around the guitar. We are excited to return back from break to be able to mount all of our mechanisms that we have and hopefully get the ball rolling through.

Hannah Testing the stopping mechanism.

QRB2 and prototyping progress

This week, the team worked on our different mothers of invention. The Les Paul guitar was painted and the accent parts were printed as can be seen below. 

Les Paul guitar

The base for the iteration portion of the display was successfully 3D printed as well.

 

Iteration base

The other 3 mothers of invention are all being worked on. The pulley system for serendipity is ready to mount. The electronics for the imagination sequence are being developed and the rocket is being 3D printed. The graphic for CJ Walker has been received and the flowers and gears are being printed.

The team also presented our QRB2 presentation this week. We went over all of this progress in more detail and our plans for the rest of the semester. Next week we will be working on completing a lot of the wiring and finishing up the 3D printing for the track and our other designs.

More Modeling and Testing

Les Paul guitar 3D model in Solidworks!
Iteration light bulbs now working with pressure sensor.

This week, additional pieces for the Les Paul guitar were modeled and sent to be 3D printed!! Additional printing of track and track mounts was done as well. Big updates for our Iteration display – the lightbulbs are now working and the holder was 3D printed! The frame of the entire display was also sanded this week, and a layer of polyacrylic was applied. Oh – and fun spray paint in the Cade Museum’s colors was purchased to make everything look even nicer! Super proud of the team and all of our hard work thus far.