My team, Eliseu Amaro, Hugo Sales, Yuanxiao Ye, and I have participated on BEST’s EBEC Porto 2019!
We were asked to build a Rube Goldberg machine with the purpose of hoisting a flag, we found that a really exciting idea.
There was no time to lose so we rapidly started working on… a MVP! (wut? xP)
The requirements stated that we had to have at least 5 different mechanisms, the flag had to raise at least 1m and we would be penalized if we exceeded a certain amount of equipment.
A quest had started
We were told that we would only be allowed to try the ping pong ball three times before evaluation, so we started by inventing our own ping pong ball aproximation with duct tape.
And thought we could merge both input and output just for the irony.
In the output we have used a nail instead of an actual pulley so we could spend less buying credits.
We didn’t want to really use the ping pong ball given its physical properties and lack of testing opportunities, so we decided to create some ramps that would just lead it to a holding branch.
The ping pong ball would hit the following hammer to activate the mechanisms on the other side of the machine.
The hammer hits a pendulum that throws a marble to start the remaining mechanisms.
The marble goes to a bucket that pulls a dominoes cascade which, in turn, pushes another marble.
A marble is thrown from the dominoes cascade to a pinball like trampolim and, in turn, launched to a weight connected to the flag.
All right, how did it end?
We’ve got an 18 out of 20! :)