Multiple Perspectives Presentation Post
Group of Chinatown
Goal of Our Machine:
Goal of Our Machine: Since most of the Chinese restaurants in New York follow the custom of serving fortune cookie to their customers after meals, the goal of our machine is to break a fortune cookie as it hints at the essence of China Town. Before even starting with our project we prepared ourselves not to get discouraged, disheartened or frustrated with our failures. We saw some examples of Rube Goldberg machines on the internet and gained some confidence after seeing so many people succeed in making one.
Plan A (failed plan):
The first idea was to break the cookie, tie a string on the fortune cookie. The strings formed a triangle with the cookie at the base, we planned to drop something heavy so that the sides would move outwards and pull the base, as the dotted line shows. The force would cause the cookie to break open.
Since we could not be sure that the heavy solid would exactly drop on the string, we replaced the solid with a basket, which connected with the fortune cookie by tying with a string. A plank of wood with short wooden sticks on it was set above the basket. When balls went through the plank and drop into the basket, the weight increased and triggered the basket to fall.
As the basket fell, it pulled the base (which it’s connected to) go down either, and the two sloping sides were pulled up and outwards. The towing force was able to break the cookie.
The wood sticks were cut into equal pieces and glued on the plastic plank by using glue gun.
First Fail point:
We did the experiment, testing the ball go through each sticks. It did not work very well because the ball always stuck at the corners and the plank’s uneven plain.
Second Fail point:
The biggest failure in this plan was the connection between fortune cookie and string. We aimed to break the fortune cookie by using the towing force from strings. But when we did the experiment of pulling the strings that were tied the fortune cookie into opposite sides, the cookie did not break, and instead the string fell from the cookie. Then we used glue gun to strongly connect the fortune cookie and strings, but the glue made the cookie strongly connect together, and even became harder to break.
Plan B: (failed plan):
Our second idea was to use a seesaw to break the fortune cookie. We set one side with a sharp solid and used wire to make sure that the cookie would stay above the sharp solid. Drop heavy object on the other side, making the sharp solid go up in high speed and force to break the cookie. But we failed because of the speed, a higher speed was necessary, and it was difficult to meet that.
Plan C (finally worked):
After two failed attempts we remembered that third is the charm and decided that instead of dropping the idea we should go with the flow and improvise when and where we got stuck. The idea of a Rube Goldberg machine is to make a simple task complicated, so started with the idea of breaking open the cookie by a ball falling on it and then went backwards. We found some old pipes, broken study lamp and some other things in the Green Center.
We placed a cookie in a small china dish that we suspended from the lamp stand and hoped for the ball to drop on the cookie in the dish, but the chances of that happening every single time was slim. So we improvised our plan and moved the cookie from the dish to the floor. As we still wanted to keep the china dish in our machine we thought that it would be nice if the ball drops in the dish and it both falls on the cookie to break it open.
After figuring out how to break the cookie, we make a path for the ball to go through. We used the old pipes to make a path and a stand for it as well. Cutting the pipes was more difficult and time consuming than we thought it would be. At first we tried using an olfa knife and quickly realized that it is not a good idea. Then we looked for more tools in the tool kit we got for our space class, where we found a saw and used that to cut it. We cut and fit different pieces of pipes and then put a squash ball through it. After making sure that the ball would go through the desired pipe paths we secured the pipes in place with lots of tape. Then we tested to see if the ball would follow the path and then drop into the dish making it fall on the cookie. It did not work because we could not have the dish hanging exactly where the ball would fall out from the pipes. We tried to see it was possible to add the lamp shade in our path because the machine felt too simple with only the pipes, when we tested the addition of lamp shade in our pipe path we were happy and excited to see that it worked better than we hoped for. After adding the lampshade we tried to suspend the china dish from it in a way that it would partly fall when the ball drops in it. To suspend the china dish from the lampshade we used string and wire. After the ball drops into the dish it falls from there into a pop tart box stuck to a wooden plank placed like a seesaw.
