Donation box prototypes
I have begun to plan and design some aspects of the marble run window of my interactive donation box. There are two main aspects i have been focusing on so far are, ways to lift the marbles back to the starting point and different track elements for on the way down. For both of these i have begun the construction of cardboard prototypes.
Marble lift
There are a few different methods that are used to lift marbles, the main ones being screw based or disk based, i have decided that it would be much easier to go with the disk design as it would be much easier to manufacture out of predominantly wood
This video shows my prototype, the final version will have 5 of the wheels and gears to keep the wheels in sync
Track Elements
For my cardboard prototypes it is very difficult to produce any shape with much of a curve, so i have focused on the moving elements of the track. These designs are based off many other marble runs on youtube. This setup is designed to be the elements that will fill one side of the display. In the final version there will be more simple and decorative elements such as spirals and twists to connect the moving elements.
I will hopefully have some more videos of prototypes up in the next few weeks as i work on them.
Week 1 – Choosing a Project
At school we are just into our first weeks of year 12, subjects continue much the same as usual, but in Design and Technology (D&T) and Software design and development (SDD) we are required to do a major project. While I am really keen to get started on my projects for both of these im getting stuck trying to decided upon one idea (for each).
For software design and development we need to design and document a video game and have been pointed at python and pygame to create it. As part of the project brief for our SDD major project we need to make weekly posts on the status of our project and what we have been up to.
With a bit of free time is made a little game prototype to warm up my knowledge of pygame and test the basic concept for a simple idea.
The aim of the game is to get to the green circle, this is done using the arrow keys and climbing on boxes, the boxes are dropped from the ceiling, and darker boxes crush lighter boxes.
For those interested it can be downloaded below
[download id="23"]
If i developed this into a full game it would include other puzzle aspects such as blocks of differing sizes, and perhaps different properties. As well as this i would probably have a mode where you can see the order of all the blocks to be dropped.
The other main ideas that i am deciding between is an RTS revolving around interplanetary warfare, and a version of lemmings where the aim is to kill all of them.
By next week's post I hope to have decided upon a final project and started programming it, I will also include a summary of results from a survey that we needed to carry out as part of the project.