Blue Fox - DONE!

My most complex ball machine to date is finally finished after 10 months of construction. It has 22,000 pieces, 120 moving parts, 86 gears, 16 paths, 7 motors and 6 lifts. I’ll make a video later, right now I have a lot of reliability testing to do.

Blue Fox - New Tracks (also 100th post)

This is my 100th post on this blog!

Also, here is an update on the construction of Blue Fox.
Since finishing the spring semester, I have had tons of free time to resume work, and construction is progressing rapidly. I have already constructed four new paths: The giant loop, the robot arm, a medium-length roller green roller coaster track, and a vertical drop track. At the moment I am working on general reliability as well as balancing the topology of the machine, in other words, making sure a ball lift doesn't have too many inlets or outlets, and that balls spend equal time in each segment. I plan to upload a topology map later, something which I have never done before. With a machine this complex, however, I feel that it is necessary.

I have also reprogrammed the robotic arm. It now operates at nearly twice the speed, as well as taking a new path which avoids the tracks I have placed in its way. I'm still a ways away from completion, however. Because this is the most complex K'nex machine I have ever constructed, reliability testing will take a very long time.

New Track - Giant Loop

I can not bring myself to construct a large ball machine without including the classic giant loop. Despite my success in constructing the first successful K'nex corkscrew, that track has been abandoned for reliability and space issues. This has freed up space to construct the two new tracks I have posted recently. Due to the space taken up by the loop, the programming for the robot arm track had to be adjusted, slipping the arm through a tiny gap in-between the loop supports and the giant supporting arch. With this track, I hope to add some balance to the flow of the balls from tower to tower.

K'nex Ball Machine Robot Arm Track Test 1

The robot arm is now fully integrated into the rest of the machine.

2-axis K'nex robot arm proof-of-concept

Bi-directional K'nex Motor Control with an Arduino

So this is what I'm up to this week, now that I am done with school. I purchased a bunch of new electronic components, as well as two new k'nex motors, and am experimenting with programmable bi-directional control. So far it's working great, I plan to integrate this into my latest ball machine, if possible.

Blue Fox - Interactive 360° Panorama

I discovered Photosynth recently, so I made a 360 degree panorama of my room/ball machine. This way, you can see the entire machine in a 105 megapixel image rather than one piece at a time, because it really is impossible to photograph it all at once.
Anyway, enjoy! Link