Slotbots Reflection: Radhika

ME250 this semester was quite a ride. To say that it was “pretty time consuming” would be very much an understatement. Learning to cope with this time crunch was a pretty big takeaway. As a team, we could have handled our scheduling better. We tended to shy away from parts of our project that stumped us – the design of the release mechanism for our wedge for example, and we kept pushing that back until it was looming over us at a point where we should not have been thinking about a design at all.

Where design is concerned, the biggest take away from this project for me is the importance of simplicity. Our concept involved playing both on the table and in the slot and we ended up having 4 modules as a result. While I initially considered two cars to be a very simple idea to implement, the success of the whole concept relied too heavily on them, and their manoeuvrability. When we got the control systems, we realised that we did not have the required amount of control over our cars – especially since we had two cars and one control module. Perhaps we should have considered these limitations earlier on and factored in the lowered flexibility of our cars. In retrospect, I feel like a cohesive single module machine, with motors focused on simple tasks like pushing/pulling/raising/ lowering in a single direction would have been a better way to approach this project since we were after all not playing with sophisticated control systems. In retrospect, our concept seems quite complicated to me at least. While our strategy might have been quite interesting, we got a little too carried away with it and maybe did not consider how extensive our idea was getting. Machining consequently became quite a long drawn out process as well, and we did not manage to fit in enough testing, especially with the controller.

However, the main reason this happened was because we did not know what the machining process would be like. None of us had machined before and we were not fully aware of what we could or could not achieve easily. And this experience was very invaluable in giving us perspective on all these points. Now, with experience under our belt, we can approach the following project classes much better prepared.

Overall, the concept of slotbots was an engaging way to introduce design and machining to us. But I do feel like the first half of the semester, with the lectures and theory, did not resonate enough when we began the manufacturing process in the last few weeks. Perhaps some manufacturing processes could be linked to earlier tutorials/homeworks so that there isn’t a huge time lag between the machine shop training and the actual use for it. When we finally began using the shop, a lot of things had slipped our mind and we spent a lot of time just trying to start up the mill or lathe for example. Also, I felt that some of the earlier homeworks did not completely fall in line with what we were learning in lectures either, so this could be an area for improvement.