Propelled Vehicle

Original Structure (Demonic. I know)

While Building

During Build

Broke right before final test

Final Vehicle

Final testing position

The purpose of this project was to construct a vehicle that will move forward on its own power.

The directions were to design a vehicle that will begin at rest, but, with a designed trigger, will move forward.

First, Yuna and I decided to make a balloon-powered vehicle. The initial design that we had, did not work out very well. I think the issue with it was that it was too heavy and the wheels had too much surface area. We tried to fix those issues by adding thin rubber bands to the wheels to reduce the surface area and cutting parts of the structure off to make it more light weight. But none of those re-designs helped the structure go further than 3 meters, when it had to go 5 meters. So we scrapped the design and started building a new one.

For our new design, we decided to make the base a piece of cardboard so that the structure would be light weight and there would be less of a force pushing downward. We changed our wheels to CD's so that there would be less surface area. But we taped two CD's for each wheel because if we only used one, it would get stuck in the crevices in the floor boards. The wheels would have to be completely parallel if we wanted them to go straight. So we used textbooks to ensure that they were perfectly parallel. And we then put the balloon with a tube on the top.

When testing the new structure, we realized that when the balloon released air, it would hit the wheels. In order to fix that, we created a table on top of the cardboard and put the balloon with the tube there so that it avoids the wheels.

Right before the final test, the structure fell off the table and the stick in the back that was attached to the two wheels completely snapped. We had to quickly get the hot glue, get a new stick (thanks to me I foresaw this event and brought extra) and we did not care anymore about the wheels being parallel, so we just glued the wheels on and tested our structure.

When the tested our design, the structure went a bit further than 10 meters (yay hooolllaa!) and the structure took 5.82 seconds to get there. We were able to achieve the two design challenged that we picked because the first time we built our original structure, it went 3 meters. We doubled and passed that distance.

For next time, I would probably make sure that the structure does not break and properly glue the wheels so that they are parallel.