Project 3

I set out at the beginning of this project to make a marble run that iterates one marble at a time as a for loop does. In the beginning I thought this would be easy enough to accomplish and then I could spend loads of time making it beautiful, testing it and putting cool loops and jumps in it. NOT the case!

Lets look at my process to understand.

 

This (above) is the first idea I had and made a miniature model for the interim-presentation.  

So I decided to make a prototype and spent around 13hrs straight fighting with this wire contraption. It worked in a way and was really fun to play with but for the life of me, I could not get the loop function to work. After all that work I had to scrap the idea and decided to work on a vertical board, so that interchanging parts during my development would  be alot easier.

This is the beginning of my "cartridge" idea. The marbles are placed in the cartridge at the top left of the screen and as one reaches the bottom it triggers the next marble to be punched out, just like a gun. The next four images are of just a few of the loads of ways I tried to make this work. Next idea.

I then tried to rework my first idea, which didn't work.

And then finally made my final. This is a video of my model running well, me testing it with my flatmate and then us knocking it off the counter and smashing it. 3hrs later I finish my model but it just wasn't the same.