Building A Rollercoaster

 Alright, after a lot of testing and a lot of problem solving, we finally finished the Rube Goldberg! Here's the whole thing edited together. I tried to film and edit the video so that you could easily view each part of the chain reaction, but if you missed anything, you can look at my previous post where I go into a lot more detail. As for the actual rollercoaster, I haven't worked on it much for a while now. The problem is that I have to go into school to work on it, and my teacher is busy often. Another issue is that I don't have the right components to start working out the next phase of construction (making a complete circuit, curved/banked track sections). That said, we should be able to get back to a regular schedule very soon. 

Finally, back to school! Or online school anyway. This week I'm working with several classmates on a Rube Goldberg machine for my physics final project! Now, it's no rollercoaster, but it's still very exciting and challenging from an engineering standpoint. There's a lot of problem solving and creative solutions that have to be figured out in order for everything to work correctly. Making a Rube Goldberg under any circumstance would be tricky, but because of Covid-19, it's even harder. So in order for everyone to be able to work on the project, we were forced to split the contraption in half; one half of the system would be at someone's house, and the other at the school's FabLab. The trickiest part by far was figuring out how to get the machine to continue from one location to another. We came up with a system where an input would signal to a computer to type a letter on a shared google doc. When the photoresistor on the other end sensed the brightness of t...