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Designing A Systems With A Integrated Design Essay

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Foreword

Our team had worked on a catapult prototype from October 13 to October 25, 2016, to create a system with a functionally autonomous design. You have requested details on our prototype in order to model your labs for next semester based on the design and experience from our project. This report, which was originally assigned by Walburga Zahn on November 1, 2016, includes the design and building processes of the catapult, and the results of the catapult’s performance in several tests.

Summary

For our project, we had to create a system that uses a microcontroller to launch a ball from a catapult. Our project had specific design requirements and constraints including the use of a prebuilt catapult, rubber bands, and paper clips. With our design, we then had to complete several tasks. First, we needed to create the system using a schematic to build the circuit and connect the servos (see Figure 1, page 2). Then, we programmed the microcontroller to ensure the accuracy of our launches. In our next two tasks, we used a photo resistor to make our catapult a fully autonomous system and a photo diode to control the ball launch. Lastly, we completed the accuracy challenge, hitting the target 3 out of 10 times (see Table 1, page 5). When we analyzed the sources of error for our accuracy challenge, we realized there was a mechanical error causing the angles of our launch to be off.

Discussion

In our lab, we had several tasks to perform. The first task we needed to fulfill

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