Shopping Cart Challenge!

This is the product that my group and I came up with. We used www.buildwithchrome.com making it easier to develop and build a prototype.

Our goal was to create a "shopping cart of the future", making it easier on shoppers when going to the mall or the grocery store. The wheels are all battery powered, with a control interface on the handle of the cart, to turn and control the motors. The carts would be able to be plugged into the wall to charge up, and the batteries powering them would be cheap and compact, not weighing down the cart too much. We also incorporated the idea of having a screen somewhere on the cart, enabling shoppers to get a map of the store and the departments. It would also allow them to search up any items they were looking for. It's a pretty snazzy idea.

Pros and Cons

+ Very easy to use because of powered wheels and navigation

- Probably very expensive

+ Easily adaptable for any disabled customers

- Target for theft due to expensive equipment

+ Recipes and Nutritional Values help keep user health conscious 

- Would raise the building's electrical bill, because of all the charging carts

Super Advertising!

This commercial caught my attention most because it was split up into two parts, which was unique, and made it a lot funnier.

The average cost for a Super Bowl commercial, for only 30 seconds, is $4 million. You also have to incorporate the costs for making the commercial, and hiring a team to edit and make the commercial appeasing to the audience. A 16oz bag of Wonderful Pistachios costs around 10 dollars, meaning that the company would need to sell around 400,000 bags of pistachios, not including tax reductions. I think becuase of how well the commercial did, and how much people liked it, the pistachio company will make their money

Ping Pong Ball bridge challenge

In this challenge, we had 18 minutes to construct a bridge that could get a ping pong ball across a 12 inch gap. I was in a group with Daniel and Alistair, and we thought to build a ramp that we could drop the ping pong ball onto, launching it across the gap.

Here is a picture of our ramp:

We used straws, paperclips, and tape to make our bridge stand up

Our design was not very effective, because the weight of the ping pong ball was not enough to get a sufficient amount of speed for it to shoot the gap, however, working with people that I had not worked with before proved to be a good experience.

Toothpick Bridge

Our (mine and Jason's) bridge held up to 115 batteries, and weighed 11.5 grams. This is a 230:1 ratio.

We began to see our bridge sag at the strain of the batteries, right where the strings were being held:

Our bridge finally collapsed at the spots we expected it to break, right where the strings were being held:

If I were to reconstruct my bridge in an effort to make it better, I would reinforce the spots where the strings were at.

Edit: After reinforcing the areas that held the strings, we got our bridge to hold up to 267 batteries, weighing in at 12.6 grams. Coming in at a 490:1 ratio!

Lego Robotics Challenge

We spent a good amount of time, using our LEGO parts, designing and building cars that could navigate both straight and curved courses.

This was our car for the robotics challenge. The large tires made it easy to traverse over obstacles and crush smaller cars. It also had good traction. It was able to complete the straight line challenge, which was going three feet without turning. We decided to keep the wheels for the next challenge, but all else had to go for us to be able to make the turn.

This was the course:

Simply a straight line

The next challenge's course was this:

You cannot see the whole thing, but that is the finish line. The turn occurs after the black piece of metal you see on the right. The starting point was just past that.

The challenge was to preform a 90 degree right turn, as shown above. We modified our car to be able to make the turn, and it barely made it across, but we crossed the finish line nevertheless. Our final product only consisted of wheels, that dragged the remote control on the ground like a sled.We got the remote control to cross the finish line, so we considered ourselves successful.