1. Principles, practices, and project management¶
Assignment¶
- Build a personal site
- Work through a Git tutorial
- Describe the final project idea
- Sketch the final project idea
Build a personal site¶
Sketch¶
This is just a quick rendering of the basic idea of my project. Since I have taken other engineering courses, I know the basics of Fusion360, so I used that to make this sketch. I thought it would be simpler and easier to understand because drawing is definitely not my strong suit.
Description of final project¶
My idea for my project is a golf ball retriever. Golf, like anything, can not be improved without an active input of time and effort. One of the most tedious things to practice is putting. Even though putting makes up about ⅓ of the total strokes for a given round, I rarely do practice it since it gets boring very quickly. The idea is that I have some sort of container with all the electronic parts and that it has some sort of catapult or other launcher (TBD) on top. This container will go into the golf hole on the practice putting green so that the top is just below the level of the green. The idea is that the ball will drop onto the top of the container and then it will be thrown back to the player. The point of practice is to get better, so of course there will be missed putts, which would render the device useless. I will address this by having some sort of claw outside of the hole that will push the missed balls (within a certain radius of the hole) to the hole to then be thrown back. This solution will motivate players to putt since they will enjoy themselves more and they will get better.
Research¶
After doing research, I found that there is already a product similar to my project called RoboCup. The problem with RoboCup is that it can only carry out its function if the ball reaches the hole. There is a “caddy cord” that comes with the device that pushes the ball towards the hole, but that is only useful if the missed putt is hard enough. My idea would retrieve any ball that is within a certain radius (probably 2-3 feet) of the hole. I will do this by taking the wood-looking curve that is around the hole and make that some sort of claw to push the balls into the hole.
Working through a Git tutorial¶
I worked through a Git tutorial about SourceTree which is a version control platform that was shown during the lecture. I have included pictures of the important steps
