Monday, December 3, 2012

FINAL UPDATE

So its official.......OUR PROJECT IS FINISHED!!

Through much frustration and a lot of fried equipment we finally came out with a great machine that works like a champ. We put quite a bit of money and time into this project and all i can say is it was worth it to see our beautiful final machine.




Above is our final project all done and was ready to go!

These are some of the things that we fried or destroyed when we were trying to put it together a lot of scraps left over hahahahaha. 

Here is another pic of the parts we destroyed. Brandon at one point wanted to see what would happen if we connected a little speaker straight to the dc power source. needless to say it started smoking and exploded hahaha. In this pic there is also a button that broke on us and the circuit board that fried and other miscellaneous parts.

Here is parts of the doorbell that also got fried hahah. the cuircit board for this doorbell apparently cant handle a laptop charger.... my bad. there is also the first laptop charger that we had that actually didn't work at all hahahah i believe it didn't have enough voltage to click our relay or pull the solenoid 

This is out magical easy button switch. we actually just gutted the thing out and put a whole new push button switch into it as you'll see in the next picture

This is the bottom of the switch that we put into the easy button.

This is the type of switch that we put into the easy button its not the exact one but the one inside looks exactly the same as this one.

This is our power source it is an 18.5 v dc laptop charge at about 3.5 amps, we decided to use a plug in rather because batters seem to run out fast and we wanted something reliable that doesn't constantly need battery changes and stuff like that. 

We built a little cuircit board to distribute the power and switch the relay and we put that into the doorbell along with the little alarm that we got at radio shack that is powered by a 9v battery, the alarm was actually pretty loud so we had to put some tape over it so it wasn't freaky scary loud.

This is our champion thor hammer hahahah. We figured out how to let it slide well over the pvc by splitting a pvc pipe and putting it over the existing place where the hammer hung by and made it fit tighter for a slimmer fit with not as much shaking. To secure the hammer we just put a bolt through the wood and the pvc T to hold them together.

To latch the hammer we just used a basic fence gate latch, here is the part that is on the hammer.

Here is the gate latch all together holding the hammer up from swinging freely. 

 Right here is probably the most important part of the whole machine the solenoid this is like the key to the lock vital part of this project. this pulls the gate latch to release the hammer and smack the ball! the solenoid is connected to the circuit board that we made and gets power when the easy button is pushed.

This project was a great opportunity to not only pass a class but to learn a lot of stuff, working with this has taught us a lot about mechanics and electronics and it defiantly seems that hands on things like this project teach you a lot more than any other way. 



Sunday, November 4, 2012

PROGRESS REPORT


UPDATE



So far since our last update we have changed a few things and we have solved a few problems that we were having. We recreated our frame and we finally found out a solution for the hammer.
As you can see we used basically a broomstick and a piece of 4x4 wood to form our mallot. its big , heavy , and should carry enough power to knock a ball using just gravity.




For our frame we basically just extended it and made a bar that goes across to connect the hammer to make the hammer swing to hit the ball.

-prestige worldwide

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Supplies report

Since our last update we have bought a few items to get the ball rolling on out machine! So far we have made a frame for our machine and we bought a doorbell that makes many different noises. Jordan started taking apart the doorbell to figure out how to make it trigger the latch. 

 
Above is the frame from our machine.



 Above is the doorbell taken apart to see the circuits








Above is the other side of the circuits on the doorbell and all the insides








Above is the wireless switch that controlls the doorbell with variable sound adjusters.

We still have a lot of work to do and we have been getting together a lot to get what we can done. Lowes is a great place to buy supplies they have a very large amount of items and a wide variety we would recomend going there.

-Prestige Worldwide


Sunday, October 7, 2012

Progress report #1

PRESTIGE WORLDWIDE PROGRESS REPORT #1!

So far we have many new ideas for our machine constantly. We have agreed upon creating a kicking machine that is super user friendly and fun to use. We have a basic design but are still debating specific design details to perfect our machine and make it exactly fitting to the needs. So far we have decided to use a Pvc frame but we don't like how normal Pvc comes apart so easily so we are either going to use glue or find some sort of Pvc that can screw together, our frame will be a team effort. Jordan is working on the release mechanism and we have agreed on using a doorbell so we can connect a latch to the circuit of the doorbell to release and at the same time creating a pleasant sound. Sammy is working on the impact tool and ball holder to create a perfect hit each time, we are thinking of using a sledgehammer with a modified head to have a better surface to hit the ball with. Brandon is working on the switch to trigger the doorbell as a simple little doorbell button wont work we need a better form of trigger. We still aren't sure if we are just going to use the weight of the hammer or a spring system but we will find out with our prototype! We have a few supplies but we are still looking for certain things. We are really looking forward to putting it together and seeing our creation work!

-Prestige Worldwide

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

THE GROUP

PrestigeWorldwide

Members:
Jordan Becerra
Brandon Carter
Sammy Perez

Our project is going to incorporate ideas from past throwing and kicking machines and improve them as well as add new ideas to create a new and improved machine.