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Blog Entry #3



For our first group engineering project, we were tasked with making a Halloween themed animatronic. My group boldly decided to make an automated candy throwing catapult under the theme of socially distanced trick or treating.


In the end, we were successful but it was quite a long and difficult journey. We were able to construct a catapult that automatically primes itself and then launches at a certain point. After which returns to the original loading position to be reloaded and fired once again in a smooth motion. The only element we could not automate in time was a mechanism to place another piece of candy in the catapult after it fired, that was done by hand.


The biggest difficulties revolved around the forces we were using to launch the candy, as with 3 one kilogram weights and the abrupt stopping motion of the arm, we suffered from lots of vibration issues. Nuts and bolts were frequently coming loose, parts were becoming misaligned, and the only solution was to add a high level of reinforcement to those parts. Some of the metal parts such as the arm of the catapult even started bending from the induced stresses. It was also difficult to get the timing of the loading and firing mechanism correctly, which also happened to be not particularly reliable and needed frequent repairs.


If I could give myself one piece of advice, it would be to do a more thorough job of modeling the project in cad so simplicity can be optimized and simulations can be run. There was a lot of trial and error that ate up time and energy. But overall, I'd say not bad for a first go at it.


Thanks for reading.

Hi, I'm Logan 

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