Design and Make

The Design and Make project was a group project that spanned the end of my first year at university and the start of my second. The aim of this project was to create a functioning prototype that completed a task assigned by lecturers. The task for my year's cohort was to design a table tennis ball launcher that would be able to launch balls into three different sections of the table.

The process for designing this went very similarly to other design projects I have done. The first step was to split up and each design our own solution for how we best thought the problem should be solved. Below is my initial design, with extra drawings showing how each requirement of the product would be fulfilled.

After choosing to go with my design, elements from other designs were incorporated as the design went through a few iterations until ending up with the design shown below. This will be a lot simpler to build and should be more accurate due to using a worm gear and geneva mechanism.

Then it came time to build and test our design. Unfortunately, due to the design choice of using studs and nuts to hold everything together, we were unable to put our design together in the allocated time. What we ended up with is shown below.

To make this more successful were we to try again it would be better to have ‘walls’ that each level slotted into rather than relying on multiple threads to hold everything together.