Networks: Thinking

Thought more about the track. A way to stop tracks from smashing into each other would be to add curved tracks. Keep the main tracks, the ones that have the most switches, straight and have the rest curve around these ones.

Another problem is that if a ball is going down one track to be redirected to another at an engine, it can only redirect correctly if its weight is heavier than the weight designated to the engine it's approaching. A way to get around this would be to put more switches at the end of that track to differentiate between balls arriving at their final destination and balls moving to a new track.

I also found some more ways to slow down the flow of ping pong balls going to the switches. The previous ones considered were the dish and the zig-zags I mentioned. The dish won't work because it would have to be huge to make a ping pong ball go around and around. But the zig-zags will and will most likely be included.

There are three more different methods that I think we could do.

Two I found in this YouTube video (Denha, 2011):



In this video I'm interested in the spiral of nails and the wall of nails on the left. They both seem to slow down the balls quite well, possibly because spacing of the nails interrupt the momentum of movement. The spiral of nails also makes the path going down longer since it's coiled up.

Figure 1: An alternative track that slows down marbles (Source: Wandel, 2011)

The third is an alternative to the dish. It's basically a path that's curved into a c-shaped tube with a hole in the middle. So when the balls go in and zip left and right across the path, it eventually loses momentum to fall at the bottom and leave via the hole.

Last night I prepared some files in Illustrator so that we could use the laser cutter to cut our parts from wood. Decided to use laser cutter because that would give us the precision that we need and it's very fast as well.






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Reference List:

Denha. (2011, September 28). Mangle marble machine [Video file]. Retrieved May 18, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHAum0izptU&list=UUQLeSzI5oBVHxPFz-PFQxMw&index=9&feature=plcp

Wandel, M. (2011). Marble run building blocks. Retrieved May 18, 2012, from http://woodgears.ca/marbles/run.html