The Rube Goldberg
For my Rube Goldberg machine, I wanted to be able to feed my dog remotely. I started my setup with a mobile phone resting on a slanted surface. When the mobile device is rang it slides down the surface and knocks into the first domino. The dominos hit a ball which slides down a ramp and sets off a mouse trap, the mouse trap is tied to a wedge on another ramp. When the wedge is pulled off a golf ball is set into motion which will hit a bigger rat trap that will set off the cascading books and cause the robot to topple over, causing the dog food to fall into the bowl. All this is explained in the following video.
The system was very delicate and accidentally got set off a few times. The golf ball was kept getting knocked off the ramp so I cut open a toilet roll holder and used it to keep the ball in place. The link between the cascading books tore frequently so I reinforced some of the ties knots with tape. The kinematic equations as well as vector forces and Newton’s second law allowed me to calculate the speed and downwards forces to set off the traps. The height of the ramp had to be increased in order to exhibit the necessary downward force. The project was extremely frustrating but the end result is shown below.
