First Post

Strategy and Machine Concept

Our strategy is to gather the balls and put it into the opposite side of the slot. Our concept is simply lift the balls up using an arm, travel, and drop the balls to the opposite side of the slot. This will be done via a pulley/wince/arm system mounted onto a cart with wheels. With the use of a motor, the arm will be lowered vertically in between the balls, and then a set of wires attached to the end of the arm will be pulled up by winch. This will lift the arm up and ping pong balls with it. Below is a CAD screenshot of our machine from our design review:

Best View of Model

Top View of Model

From the Design Review and post-meeting with our GSI, we received feedback that having wires attached to both ends may make it difficult for the arm to pick up the balls, so we have decided to make the back arm be lifted vertically without wires. This mechanism will be shown in detail in a later post.


Upon lifting the balls, another set of motors will rotate the shaft/wheels and transports the cart. When it is close enough to the other side of the slot, the pulley system will lower the arm and the balls will roll off to the other side. The mechanism can potentially lift and carry most of the balls on our side with the right coordination of the pulleys pulling and the cart moving forward. With practice, this process can be done more than once in the allotted time of a round. Our challenge in the coming weeks will be to manufacture the parts and implementing the motors to meet our desired functions.