Time Trial

        Today in lab was the time trial for seeding in the competition tomorrow and was full of ups and downs. Our first task was to attach the bead rails to our machine, which, as previously mentioned, was a selection between losing points for manufacturing or not being able to collect rubber balls. When speaking with Jean, she encouraged our group to do all that we could to get points from the balls, as this would be far more of a help to our function grade than the beads would hurt our manufacturing grade. We therefore went ahead with gluing the bead rails securely to the side rails. This proved to be a great success.

         One obstacle that we were faced with was the wiring of our motors. This was an extremely worrisome obstacle because we were only aware of it minutes before we were supposed to start our trial. When we initially hooked up the control box to our machine, we discovered that the back left wheel would not work. We also accidentally ripped out one of the connection wires to the 6 speed motor that works the front arm. We quickly re-soldered all of the connections that were giving us trouble, and after re-arranging the leads to the metal motor controlling the back left wheel, we were able to have everything functioning perfectly just as we had to run our trial.

        The trial itself went better than we could have expected and the machine was running the best that it ever had due to the care we had taken in securing all of our connections. I had been a bit nervous when first starting the drive, and knocked the first rubber ball and the ping pong ball off of the table. The ping pong ball was the only points that we knew we could for sure get. This meant that our success would depend entirely on the function of the beads, which we had not been able to test. Luckily they worked perfectly. We trapped a single rubber ball and took it back to the hole and scored with no problems at all, and we had a full 60 seconds left. We therefore went back down the table and collected the last rubber ball from our side of the table and one of the rubber balls from the other side of the table in one go and went back to the hole. Unfortunately, our machine got stuck on the ridge in the table and we could not get to the hole. We hit the ridge and took a hard left turn and rode the ridge all the way to the wall. For nearly 50 seconds I struggled to get the machine to force itself over the ridge but the ballcaster would just spin along the ridge instead of rolling over it. Then with 3 seconds left the ballcaster cleared and we dropped the two rubber balls into the left side of the hole right as time expired in an exciting finish that brought the crowd to their feet.

        The three rubber balls that we scored with were enough for us to win our section and secure us the number 4 seed for the competition tomorrow. Such success really made all the hours spent in the lab tirelessly working on our machine worth it. Now, we can go into tomorrow confident that we can make a real run at winning this competition.