Where did the team get the idea?
The team were tasked to add a unique idea on the car to allow children with mobility issues to socialize and interact with their peers. Children with mobility issues deserve the right to be equal with other kids, which means, equal opportunities. As a result, our team got the inspiration for the project from Mario Kart, rocket league and the function of the pinball flippers. The Mario Kart and rocket league gave us the idea of allowing the children with mobility issues to play kickball/soccer games by using the car. As for the pinball inspiration, it allowed us to add the flippers to the car which are attached to the motor thus being controlled accordingly by a switch.
Subsystems
The wild thing has a unique set of subsystems and each one serves a unique task. In addition, the project problem is figuring out a way to allow children with mobility issues to socialize and interact with their peers. So as mentioned before we got the inspiration from the pinball flipper function and video games such as Mario Kart and Rocket league. In order to allow them to play kickball/soccer, we have the following subsystems below:
Backup design subsystems
First backup design - using brushless motors.
As for the backup design subsystem we used two brushless motor, and each brushless motor will be connected to a tire in order to give the tire a rotation that will allow pushing the ball. For this design, we had the Arduino code set in order to make the motor rotate. The only problem we faced was with the tires it was either bigger or smaller compared to the ball it didn’t provide enough force to push the ball.
Second backup design - using three subsystems.
As for the second backup which was plan A.1 we had three subsystems to consider which are: switch, DIY reciprocating motor with the L298 dual H-Bridge and a shovel. Furthermore, this design did not meet the requirement as expected because it did not provide enough force to kick the ball.
