Week 6: May 4th, 2016

This week, we attempted to finalize the design. When putting together the motor and the rod and axle, however, wee ran into a few problems. The motor was not strong enough to hold the at the closed position, because the design was too heavy. The motor was able to spin while the rod was positioned perpendicular to gravity, so we have to modify our design to not include gravity to be as much of a factor. After brainstorming, we came up with the design below in figure 11. This design allows the motor to not be responsible for holding everything up, and it will be perpendicular to the force of gravity. The cardboard attached to the bottom has a hole on one side that will open the pringles can when rotated over the hole at the bottom on the container This is shown in figures 9 and 10. rotating the hole away from the other hole will close the device. The cardboard at the top enables the device to be the right length so there is not too much friction between the bottom of the container and the bottom cardboard piece. This device is much better than our old device because it doesn't assume that the motor can do anything besides spin the axle.

Figure 11: Mechanical Component

Figure 10: Bottom of disc 

Figure 9: bottom of container

Although this device was not our original design, it ultimately is better and works better with our product. It is feasible that people can come up with a design like this or close to this in two to three weeks even though it took us a bit longer. The manual will give hints and tidbits on how to successfully make an automatic fish feeder without just giving them a cookie cutter lab manual. Hints that would expedite this process would include noting that the motor is not that strong, and that K'nex pieces can be modified with additional pieces. Next week we will work on constructing the lab manual now that the building phase is complete.