Final Project--Final thoughts

Our creep did a great job at the exhibition, and overall we were very happy with his performance!

If given more time, however, these are the changes I would have made:

1.  In order for the scissor mechanism to successfully pop, its gear needed to start at a particular point.  If at the beginning of a cycle, the gear was not in the correct rotational position, the pop would not occur.  Here is an example:

We had programmed the motor so that it would rotate 180 degrees, pause for 5 seconds, and then rotate another 180 degrees.  Although we included a derivative controller, the creep often overshot its initial 180 degree goal because there was so much weight and pressure on the gear.  Consequently, the next 180 degree rotation brought the gear slightly past its starting point.  After about 4 cycles, the overshoot added up, and our creep stopped popping in phase two.  To fix this problem, we had to shut down the program and manually reposition the motor.  A potential solution for this problem would be to have the phase two motor initialize to a specific rotation at the beginning of a creep cycle, much in the way the phase one motor initializes with the touch sensor.  As the program is now, the rotation of the phase two motor is read at the beginning of a cycle .  A potential improvement could be that instead of just reading the rotation, the motor could rotate itself to the correct starting point.  This way, at the beginning of a cycle, both the elevator and the phase two motor would be poised and ready to go.

2.  There was a LOT of pressure on the gears responsible for phase two, so if given more time I think we could have created a gear train to lessen the pressure on them.

3.  With more time (and the gear train from above) it would have been nice to make a lid for our box so the creep would have been more of a surprise.  The way he is now, we weren’t sure about his continued ability to be able to be strong enough to lift the lid.  Also, (very aesthetically) it would be fun to add a decorative, non-functional crank, to complete the box's jack-in-the-box image.

4.  I took our robot to the mini-maker fair, where I was able to confirm what I had been suspecting--our robot was not at all an outdoor robot.  We had not designed it to be an outdoor robot, so this was not necessary a problem, but the creep's dislike of the outdoors became very apparent to me when he was exposed to the conditions.  With duct tape, Lyn and I were able to fashion cones for the light sensors, to block out natural light so that they would be able to lower their value by more than 20 when a laser was triggered.  Without the cones, there was too much ambient light for the light sensor to register a big enough drop.

Ambient light reduction cone

Path to the sensor!

There was also a great deal of wind, causing our light sensor posts to shift slightly, and throwing off the readings.  Our creep did perform successfully quite a few times at the mini-maker fair, but he required a lot of laser adjustments.  If given much more time, perhaps we could have remedied this problem by building some sort of floor boards that could flank the path to the creep, with slots built into them for our light sensors, laser, and mirror.  If this were possible, it would drastically reduce the creep's setup time and, if cones were attached to the light sensors, make our creep much more prepared to endure the conditions.

In general, I was very happy with the way our creep turned out.  I feel like I really learned a lot during the various iteration processes that Clara and I went though (like the exact dimensions of a Lego!).  After this project,  I feel much more comfortable with SolidWorks and the laser printer, as well as with problem solving in general.  I am very happy that every time we faced a creep-setback, Clara and I were able to brainstorm and figure out how to solve our problems in new and different ways.  All in all, I had a great time working on this project, and am so proud of our creep!

He's still creepin'

Ah!