Week 13

Welcome to Week 13 Blog

12 July 2021

This week we started to learn about the Operating Principles and Mechanism Designs of products. These two different things can be categorized under "How it works" and "How to enhance".

As for Operating Principles, we focus more on the key concept that allows something to work and for Mechanism Design, it is more of making use of the key concept and enhancing it such that its usage can be amplified.

After the lecture the class had, we were tasked to design a Ping Pong Ball Launcher to shoot and reload Ping Pong balls. This device that we make must be able to hold at least 5 balls and is capable of shooting the ball with stored energy from a device. The mechanism can be fully automatic, semi-automatic, or fully manual. 

Figure 1: Example of Ping Pong Ball Launcher

The group decided to go with something semi-automatic and as shown at the bottom, this
is our product along with the main working principle and mechanism that we designed along with it.

Figure 2: Group design of Ping Pong Ball Launcher

Overall, this session was a fun and enjoyable one as the group was given the freedom to design what we want as long as we meet the minimum requirement to make it launch.

Looking forward to next week. See you guys then!