Rube Goldberg Project (2018)
In my circuits lab, we had an assignment to create a Rube Goldberg Machine. The whole point of a Rube Goldberg Machine is to accomplish a simple task in an indirect and overcomplicated way. For ours, we wanted to make a buzzer beep when a force was applied, but had several other things happen during the process. Here is some images follow by the parts used and a video.
The parts used include:
- DC Power Supply
- Force Sensing Resistor
- Various Resistors
- Various Capacitors
- LM324 OPAMP
- G8QN Relay
- 555 Timer
- 74192 Counter
- 7447 Display Driver
- 7-Segment Display
- 7408 AND Gate
- LED Diodes
- Photocell Resistor
- DC Motor
- Active Buzzer
- Ultrasonic Sensor
- Potentiometer
- Diode
- Transistor
- LCD Display
- Arduino
- Dominos
We first wanted to use a temperature sensing transistor to activate our project. However through trial and error, we could not increase the voltage as much as we wanted by heating up our transistor as the sensor just was not sensitive enough. We opted this out for a force sensing resistor as that was easier to control.
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Our circuit process goes as follows:
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Another problem that we had come crossed was with the DC motor. Initially when it would turn on, it would draw too much current from the other components connected to the Arduino board, causing the ultrasonic sensor, active buzzer, and LCD display to not work correctly. This was fixed this by connecting the motor to the Vin pin on the board instead of the 5v pin with all of the other components and this resolved the problem.
One more problem that we had was since we changed out the temperature sensor for the force sensing resistor, our project did not reach the 10 second minimum that was required for the assignment. This was resolved this by adding a 7-segment display circuit to count from 0 to 9 (which initially was not apart of the design), which put our circuit well over that minimum time mark. |
Here is a video of the project in action