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 the screen change, it would trigger the other half of the machine. Describing this complex of a machine just with text can be very hard to understand, so I rendered a rough 3D model of the Rube Goldberg (see below), and we created a table describing each individual step. You can check out the proposal in its entirety

>>here.<< 

The goal of the machine is to turn on a paper shredder to shred a 2020 calendar.

Of course, as of now, this is all mostly conceptual. We have (almost) all of the individual parts put together, but we have yet to test the full chain reaction beginning to end. Below you can see some videos and images of the individual parts that we have already constructed. I'll make sure to make an update when everything is all put together.