Marble Sorter Project 1

Marble Sorter Project

Cole Reiner and Logan Malaney
Buckingham Charter Magnet High School
Principles of Engineering
Mr. Pochop
5/6/16

Table of Contents
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Brainstorming Ideas..................................................................................................................... 3
Decision Matrix..........................................................................................................3
Final Solution Sketch.4
Written Final Solution.......4
Design Modifications.6
Reflection....6
Conclusion Questions....7

Brainstorming Ideas:
Idea #1
One of our Ideas was to have a funnel with an intake wheel to control and release marbles
on a conveyor belt and on the conveyor belt we had the cups where the sorted marbles go. We
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realised that this intake wheel was not a practical way to funnel and release these marbles. The
conveyor belt may have been a way to actually sort the marbles and that could have been a fairly
good idea.
Idea #2
Our second idea had to do with sliding trap doors. Once the sensor got the value of the
marble, we would let it roll through a funnel with 4 trap doors, and depending on the trapdoor,
the marble would fall into its correct cup because it would fall through the door that was open.
Idea #3
Our third idea was a sliding vertical door where it was angled so that the marble would
actually get hit off the edge to the correct cup like the trap door design but with vertical doors
instead of horizontal doors, we had more or a wall than a floor.
Idea #4
This idea was closest to our final design because we decided to combine idea 2 and 3 and
make a simpler idea out of them, we decided to make it simpler and have a bar that pushes down
when the correct marble is going past. We also though instead of trying to time out one release
to be perfect, if we do two releases it would be much easier

Criteria
Ideas Speed Simplest Most realistic Accuracy Totals
Programming to build

#1 4 2 1 3 10

#2 3 4 2 2 11

#3 3 4 3 3 13

#4 3 5 4 4 16

Final Design
Written Program:
Do this 25 times
Let marble out of first release door
If marble is between a certain value put that servo corresponding to those values down
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If the value is not in between the certain numbers, lift all the servos up

Our final design was very simple and repetitive. That was our goal also, we wanted to
make this sorter as simple as possible because it does not help to make an overly complicated
machine that is harder to program for no reason when you can build a fully functional simpler
design.

In the end, our design was mainly based on ranges from the values of the line follower to
sort the marbles and then we used five servos to execute this procedure. The design was fairly
accurate in the end with 90% consistent accuracy and sometimes 95% if we are lucky. The only
reason that we could not get 100% accuracy was if the marbles doubled up when going down the
first release, it would cause the sensor to get inaccurate and end up missing a few.
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Design Modifications
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The only two things we modified during this whole process was where we put our line follower.
Instead of putting our line followed on the side, we put it on the top so that it had more of the
color of the marble to sense while it was there. This made it more accurate and faster. We also
added the second release later on because having the marbles back to back while being sensed
also made the line follower values inaccurate.

Reflection
In the end, we accomplished our objective mostly, with our objective being to sort the
marbles accurately with the simplest design we could think of at the time without researching
other marble sorter designs online. The main thing that our team would do differently next time
is make our supports neater. We did not have the nicest looking machine do to all the cross
supports and other supports. Also we could brainstorm a little better next time because although
we did brainstorm, we were not very creative while doing this and we came up with very similar
designs. We feel that our machine did fulfill the problem statement and we even sorted more
than the problem statement originally asked us to do. We learned that sometimes there are some
problems that no one could have expected would happen while designing that you have to
overcome because there is no time to redo the whole design of the sorter with only a week left.
Working in a team was mostly easy because two people solving a problem is easier than one
person trying, but there are also disagreements that you will have to dissolve while in teams
because you have to make everyone's ideas count.

Conclusion Questions:
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1. What was the most challenging aspect of this design problem?

The most challenging part for our group was the actual thinking of the ideas and design of the
sorter because it was something we have never come close to doing before.

2. What are some creative changes that you would make to the design solution if you could
start over?

We would probably make a one step release system to make the marble sorter faster, we could
make so that the marble could be released one at a time a different more efficient way to save us
a servo.