The switches and rails were more complicated than we originally thought, especially because it's hard to see what's happening on paper.
However, we decided that short switches weren't going to work because it wouldn't have enough time to flip over when the weight of the ping pong balls arrive. So Tim went up to the 3D labs to cut and drill some switches at a decent length.
I began to calculate roughly how long the rails would need to be if they were straight. I drew up a diagram first so that I could see where the rails needed to go.
A is the lightest weight and D is the heaviest weight. The numbers represent which weights would trigger their switch first. So 1 would leave for their destination first, 2 would leave second and 3 would stay on the original rail to its destination.
As seen in the diagram there are various points where the rails would most likely intersect, especially in the middle. We can't have any of the rails touching or else the ping pong balls would get trapped. Gotta think of a way to get around it, but it's really confusing at the moment because even drawn on paper I can't really see what's happening clearly.
The engines on the other hand are seeing some development. We found that the displacer and cranks cause too much friction against the can. This stops it from running. So at the moment we're looking for alternatives, preferably not something as flimsy those coke cans. We found that they would keep cracking and so we couldn't get the engines to be air-tight enough. The displacer was also too heavy to move on its own.
The pace of our work, I feel, is slow because for some reason we're really not motivated and I think that is the main problem at the moment. I think if we keep on trying, maybe eventually we'll get more hopeful that things will go better and we can build up our energy from there.
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