Engineers? Is This Any Good? – IOTW Report

Engineers? Is This Any Good?

Sunday, 25 March 2018, 0:30 BFH Uncategorized 27

I thought this was pretty damn good.

(I’ll find out later that this is something engineers have to do in school and it’s not even well done.)

An interesting, complicated, self-playing  pinball machine, made from bits and pieces of junk drawer items.

VIDEO HERE

27 Comments on Engineers? Is This Any Good?

  8. BigSlurpy is correct, this would be classified as a Rube Goldberg device.

    From Wikipedia ~ “A Rube Goldberg machine is a deliberately complex contraption in which a series of devices that perform simple tasks are linked together to produce a domino effect in which activating one device triggers the next device in the sequence. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor of such contraptions, Rube Goldberg.”

    While this may be fun to watch, it is also completely useless, so I’m sure commie progtard professors everywhere would consider it to be transcendent.

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  12. The only time this would have been done back when I was in engineering school (mechanical) by engineering students some odd 30 years ago would have been as part of a beer pong party on a weekend or holiday when there were no exams or projects due. That’s because as neat as this is to watch, it is a useless widget that was “put together” as a lark for visual stimulation.

    If it were an actual engineering project, we would have had to create drawings and calculations showing all the materials used (with specific mechanical properties of each material and component detailed) along with precise movements of each part and the calculated forces required (coefficients of friction for the materials used, directional energy vector calculations, etc.) to create each action / reaction shown in the setup. Then the detailed plans would be used to build the “device” shown and it would be tested to verify that our design drawings and calculations correctly predicted the functioning as shown.

    From what I read about universities these days, this contraption might qualify as a PhD level thesis project in current “academia” though.

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  13. I might add that it also would have had to be a much simpler contraption because we were using scientific calculators to do calculations (computing power was still in its infancy) and we were still doing drawings using paper, a T-square and various templates. I took one of the first CAD classes offered in GA colleges and it was on a shared server using the earliest version of Windows that crashed and froze up constantly – all the professor knew how to do was to reboot the server (which may have been the only solution at the time), so we often lost everything we had just spent hours doing.

    To do something as large and complicated as this would have taken years to complete for a student project back then as a “real” engineering project, and probably would now even with the tools available today.

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  16. Thanks, Bubba’s Brother. Enjoyed your posts on a couple of levels.

    p.s. My sister was the only person to ever call me Bubba. Not always, but often. Never knew where that came from, but I took it as an endearment on her part.

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  18. This is more of a high school physics class lab project. It exemplifies the concepts of potential and kinetic energy, gravity, kinematics, friction, inertia and momentum, all of which are taught at a senior level physics class (at least when I was there 40 years ago).
    That is where kids usually decide science is cool, or better left for the nerds.

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  26. @ Bubba’s Brother
    That brings back some memories.

    I don’t recall in my junior or senior year when there were “no exams or projects due”. I had nightmares for years afterwards about missing due dates and exams.

    I think the first CAD I used was AutoCAD (V3.2?)in 1988. The HP computer hard drive was 40MB, so we had to store files on floppies. It often crashed, or the files got corrupted. Before that it was Mylar, vellum, and pencil. The delete command worked so much better than an electric eraser.

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