We Henrik, Paskal and Pim formed a team to participate in the Design Challenge 2011 organized by the Jade Hochschule in Wilhelmshaven. (http://www.design-challenge.de/dc2011)
This year the challenge is to play mini golf from a rail system 30 cm above the course area. The rail system provides the power for the robot. It is quite a challenge to design and build a robot capable of doing this task.
However last year we learned about the existence of the FabLab so we figured we could make good use of the facilities that are provided. So we designed the main body in CorelDraw out of an A4 sheet of 8 millimeter plexiglass. On Tuesday we went to Groningen to get the design printed. And due to the very generous people at the FabLab we were able to print our design, as you can see in the video. We had to run the laser cutter three times because it could not go through the plexiglass in one go. For people who want to cut 8 millimeter thick plexiglass we suggest to do it three times at 0.2 speed.
When we got home we started building the screws as fast as possible to get the different parts together. And it came together beautiful as you can see in the picture. How ever due to the fact that we had to run the laser cutter three times the plexiglass had some angles where it should have been straight. This is however not a significant problem.
