Projects - MacGyver Contest
During my university education at Technical University of Braunschweig, in the 2nd year, I competed at the MacGyver contest. A competion between junior engineers to solve a problem with limited budget aud time.
What was the project about?
During the 3rd semester of college at Braunschweig University of Technology the engineering have the chance to compete in an inventor/engineering competion hosted by the University an the Institut fuer Dynamik und Schwingungen
On this page I will give some general overview of what our team constructed and how the resulting machine was working.
Finally you can find some pictures and videos. For more information you can check out the website of the MacGyver competition.
motivation
- competing in an engineering competition fellow students from the university
- building a machine to perform in a fixed time on an extremely low-budget
task
minimal system requirements:
- prepares (cuts/slices/peels) and arrange different fruits on a plate
- delivers the fruit salad one meter onto another table
constraints:
- a time constrained of 2 weeks between being given the task above
- present the final machine in front of an audience at the yearly TU-day event
- keep a fixed/ small budget (20 Euros were given to each team)
- further material can be "scavenged"
setup
timer
- in order prepare one fruit at a time and keeping the fixed budget in mind the team decided to use a water clock approach to time the several tasks and subtask
- therefore a water reservoir (A) was used that is slowly emptied into another reservoir (B) (previously empty) which was suspended by a spring
- due to the increase of weight over time of reservoir (B) the spring is elongated and the reservoir (B) will decent over time
- while descending it will trigger pre-stressed strings which, when triggered will execute previewed tasks
individual fruit machines
- banana peeler and slicer
- apple slicer
- cherry pitter
- grape dispenser
- yogurt dispenser
plate delivery system
- prestressed fixed arm that when triggered will serve the prepared fruit plate onto a table in 1m distance
Project information
- Category engineering
- Project date 2017
- Project URL YouTube