Lab 0

The "toy" that we took apart was a PC CD player. It supplied us with two motors and a gear head. We implemented the gear head and the single motor connected to those gears in our first two designs.

Our initial design was a wheel mechanism. We were going to use the motor we took out of a CD player to drive a single wheel into driving the ping pong ball up the ramp. The ball would be forced by friction to fly out of the apparatus. This can be seen in the sketch below.




This device failed to produce enough power to drive the ball an acceptable distance and was inconsistent.

Our next idea consists of a wheel with a lever arm that would strike the ball (similar to a bat hitting a baseball). This idea can be seen in the sketch below.


With this idea we wanted to implement the gear system that came with the CD player. We used one gear to drive the lever arm and the other gear had a cam on it. The cam would be used to load the ping pong balls at the proper time (revolves 1 for every 4 revolutions of the lever). This device worked fairly well but the gear system broke and we were unable to use it any more.

For our third idea we decided to abandon the CD player's motor all together and move to something much larger with more torque. It used a spring and a rod to drive the ball. A cam would bend the spring and rod back and once the cam has passed a certain point the spring would be release and the rod would strike the ball. To load this system we have a vertical loader that the rod would fit under. Once one ball was struck another ball would replace it. Sketches can be seen below.


This designed works fairly well. Pictures of the actual device can be seen below.