The Ball Launching Assignment

Paul Twomey
2 min readMar 31, 2021

The ball launching assignment has not got off to a great start, my tumbler robot can’t seem to keep himself up straight. I’m worried that the gyroscope is malfunctioning. This would be a complete disaster as it would mean I couldn’t complete the assignment. For the ball launcher itself I remember that years ago my brother bought a Lego robotics kits. The kit came with a load of coloured balls and a ball container. He was able to use a colour sensor to sort the different balls into individual compartments. The kit itself was a ‘one hit wonder’ and never really got used after that. I’m hoping I will be able to repurpose the kit to launch the ball from the storage compartment by using a motor to perform a slider crank mechanism. In some ways it feels like I’m setting myself up for failure, the kit itself is old and some of the components may be missing or not working at all, it could be difficult to program and I’m not sure how effective I will be able to launch the ball from the container. I’ve been searching through boxes to find more parts. Despite all that this feels like the better alternative, after all who wouldn’t want to play with Lego. The track itself seems like it could be easy enough to set up, I could potentially use cereal boxes or photo frames as barriers. A lot of work a head.

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