Thursday, December 01, 2005

Potential Future Projects

There's so much fun to be had with ballistics, robotics, engineering and science in general. Way too much to fit it all in, especially considering we can only meet once every two weeks. But here are some potential long-term projects.

---

Potato Gun: Build One

Build a new potato gun. More powerful, more adaptable, smaller, bigger, easier to use, whatever -- just better in general. We could stick with combustion or move to a pnuematics-based system.

Potato Gun: Stress Testing

Fire a potato at things and see how well they hold up. Brick wall? Wood wall? Pile of cans? Pile of trash cans? A dummy?

Oh, wouldn't it be fun to have a dummy...

;-)

Potato Rocket [& Launcher]

Stick a rocket engine in a potato and see what happens. Or adapt the potato gun to work as a sort of potato rocket launcher. :)

Rockets: Misc.

Experiment with building rockets in different ways. Two stage, multiple simultaneous engines, booster rockets - you name it. Maybe have a contest, "who can build the coolest rocket."

Rocket-Powered Merry-Go-Round

Stick a rocket on the side of a miniaturemerry-go-round and make a rocket-powered merry-go-round.

Rocket-Powered Other Stuff

Name something, and we'll make it rocket-powered. Frisbee, for instance.

Well, not anything... safety first, remember! :)

Bridge-Building Contest

Build a bridge. The one that can support the most weight wins!

(Bonus points for making it potato gun-proof.)

Remote Controlled Car/Boat/Plane

Bonus points for making it intelligent, and thus a robot. More bonus points for making it rocket-powered! :)

Soccer Robot

Make a soccer-playing robot... or, even better, a team of soccer-playing robots!

Robotics: Misc.

Make other cool robots. :)

Hovercraft

Bigger? Smaller? Faster? Maneuverable?

Rocket-powered???

Actual Physics

Calculate how far a potato or rocket goes, project trajectories, and so on. This would just be incorporated into our other projects.

---

I will update this list as we come up with more ideas. Stay tuned!

Third Meeting - Preview

Tomorrow, December 2nd, we are having our fourth meeting. Unfortunately, it will be slightly shorter than usual because of a special schedule.

We will be starting an egg drop contest, which we will finish at our next meeting. Contestants must get an egg as high as possible while still having it return to the ground intact. There are four options available:

1. Send your egg up in a rocket. High risk, high yield, medium-high fun.
2. Launch your egg out of the potato gun. High risk, medium-high yield, high fun.
3. Toss your egg up in the air. Low risk, low yield, low fun.
4. Come up with something else!

We will supply:

- Rocket bodies
- Engines
- All other rocket launch equipment (pad etc.)
- Potato gun
- Plastic cups
- Everything left over from the Rube Goldberg machines contest
- And anything else you can find :)

---

If you couldn't care less about eggs, a couple kids might also start experimenting with LEGO MindStorms. We will also talk about a couple of upcoming local competitions which we might want to enter.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Inventory: Robotics & Other

As you may already know, the BSEC's goals extend far beyond model rocketry. While we're not off to such an explosive start with our robotics program, we've had lots of fun -- the most fun of all, in fact -- with our potato gun.

What follows is a partial listing of our non-rocketry materials.

Toph Tucker

1 potato gun
1 beginner's LEGO MindStorms set
1 even more of a beginner's LEGO MindStorms set (virtually non-programmable)
1 robotic arm (unassembled; quite complex)

Peter Wilmot

Know-how, experience and some robotics magazines. Details to follow.

Vivek Pai

Enthusiasm and "neverending charm." :-) Details to follow.

Monday, November 14, 2005

Inventory: Rockets

Following the disappointment of last Friday's failed launch, I have re-evaluated our supplies. The club has actually inherited a fairly large supply of rocketry materials from its three co-founders. A partial list follows.

---

Toph Tucker

2 fully built & waterproofed rockets (engine sizes A / B / C)
2 unbuilt rockets
2 unbuilt mini rockets
4 large launch pads (various stages of completion)
1 mini launch pad
5 "Electron Beam" electronic launch controllers
2 spare parachutes
2 paratrooper figures
3 launch rod caps (with wind streamers)
1 plain orange streamer
4 B6-4 engines
LOTS of wadding, plugs and manuals :)

Peter Wilmot

Lots of fun stuff. Unclear how much we'll be able to use. Details to follow. :)

Vivek Pai

At least two built standard-sized rockets. Details to follow.

---

Wish List

While I have the four B6-4 engines -- that's roughly medium-sized, folks -- I do not have any igniters to go with them. That, of course, is an issue, and basically means that we can't use those engines until we get igniters for them.

Over Thanksgiving break I will be looking into some new acquisitions, possibly including additional engines/igniters, larger engines, and larger rocket kits. We hope to have a brief planning session before the break in order to decide what we want to get.

At some point in the future we hope to attempt a multi-stage rocket. Instead of enjoying only one thrust phase, multi-stage rockets drop their lower portion as they peak and begin another thrust phase. It would also be fun to see what we could do with larger rockets. I'm still bent on including a couple of small payloads: candy bags with parachutes and a small bunch of ants. (Why? Just because they'd survive! They fall slowly enough that, as long as we don't fly them into the upper atmosphere or kill them during launch, they'd make it down all right.)

Stay tuned, and be sure to email one of us if you have any suggestions.

Monday, October 31, 2005

Second Meeting: Rube Goldberg Machines - Toph's Take

Simplicity may be a virtue, but not in this case. :)

What I failed to make clear in my last posts is that the point of this exercise was to make a complicated Rube Goldberg machine -- which I called, for want of better words (which I have now found), a "simple machine," when in fact it is a string of simple machines (levels, pulleys, weights, ramps, and so on) put together. For an excellent example of what we were attempting, watch the amazing "Cog" Honda advert, which we showed to the contestants before they began.

In any case, I maintain that our loss was not as pathetic as Vivek made it out to be. ;-) The design was sound; we just ran out of time for fine tuning. Yes, we lost, but we put up a good fight.

Here is how the two machines worked, with steps marked.

Winners

1. A marble is dropped down a looped ramp
2. The marble knocks a ping pong ball onto a metal cart on a metal track
3. The cart rolls off the track...
4. ...down a ramp...
5. ...and onto a padded chair

Losers

While our lack of fine-tuning meant that the machine never worked from start to finish (we got the individual parts to work, and even got through a couple steps in a row), here is our design:

1. A ping pong ball is dropped down a cardboard tube
2. The ping pong ball hits half of a straightened paper on its way through the tube, which acts as a level to push a marble down a second tube
3. The ball and marble roll into two cups on a metal cart -- marble on the bottom, ping pong ball on top -- on a metal track
4. The force of impact knocks the cart back on its tracks, which pulls a weight attached to the cart by a string off the edge of a table
5. The weight falls, pulling the cart to the end of the track
6. The cart is jolted to a stop by a metal gate at the end of the track, knocking the ping pong ball out of its cup and into a tube
7. Both machines end similarly: our ball, too, rolls onto a table and off the edge

-----------
Note that we had no time for the potato gun "Ballistic Battle" mentioned in my earlier preview. It has been delayed until our third meeting.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Long-Term Goals

Vivek already posted the brainstorming notes from our last meeting, but I thought I'd elaborate on a few points.

Robotics

There are several robotics competitions that we could theoretically enter -- and, at some point, we hope to. We'll start small, with things like LEGO Mindstorms and other kits, and perhaps build our way up to more fun, useful, crazy ideas.

Like a hovering robot... oo....

With a mounted potato gun...

Ooo....

Hovercraft

Unfortunately, a hovercraft like the one we're hoping to eventually make (see earlier post) is extremely hard to build and would take a very, very long time. We're certainly still hoping to make one -- it will just take a long, long time. :)

Cloning

While I'm certainly happy people are enthusiastic about throwing out wild ideas -- that's the whole point of brainstorming, after all -- this one's, well, just a wee little bit unlikely.

Not to mention illegal.

So I'd say we won't be cloning any time soon...

:-)

Second Meeting - Preview

Hi, my name is Toph Tucker. I'm one of the co-founders of the BSEC, and will probably be posting here a lot.

Although Vivek mentioned it earlier, here's a preview of our second meeting, which will be happening on Friday, October 28 in the Physics room (S5) below the Library.

Simple Machines Contest

In our first-ever competition, each group (you may work in pairs of two, with one group of three if we have an odd number of participants) must build a simple Rube Goldberg machine. The task (subject to change) is to move a ping pong ball through the most number of steps. (For example, rolling down a tube would be one step; falling into a cup might be another.)

We will supply materials. The rough list follows:
  • Ping Pong Balls
  • Straws
  • Balloons
  • Paper Cups
  • Cardboard Tubes
  • Paper
  • String
  • Paper Clips
  • Rubber Bands

We will also supply basic construction materials:

  • Tape
  • Glue
  • Scissors

We hope to see all club members there! Start planning!

Potato Gun Contest

In our first Ballistic Battle, two potato guns square off to see which can shoot the farthest. Stay tuned!