The Advantage And Disadvantage Of A Control Board
During the seventh meeting of Ruth's Rubes we decided that a control board would be a useful asset to our machine. A control board would allow all the disconnected parts to connect in one area. While this would be incredibly helpful it could also be complicated.
A control board would be helpful because it would allow all the dissconnected parts to connect and it would make it far easier to fix things that happened between parts because it wouldn't take up the entire machine. However the control board that we are thinking of using is flat pegboard, the same material that most of the machine is made of. The pegboard is vertical so certain elements wouldn't work on it. Furthermore the smaller space can be limiting for all the connections that would go onto it.
There are not many alternatives to the control board besides connecting all the elements, something that could take an incredible amount of valuable time. Ruth's Rubes only has six more meetings, including the one that is occuring later today. With only seventeen elements that we are certain count we need to add as many as we can over the next several meetings. With the knowledge that testing is essential to ensurring the robustness of the machine it would be hard to find time to acertain that they are all connected.
A control board would save us an incredible amount of time in building the machine. A control board would however need to be succinct in its design and would not count for many steps. It could however count for some, allowing us to concern ourselves with it slightly more than we would be able to otherwise.
The main issue with a control board would be the material that it is made of. Pegboard alone, especially in such a vertical position as it is in, will not serve to make a good control board. We need to find a better material to make our control board out of. A control board would work best if it worked simply but efficently while adding new steps. This may be hard but it would be far more helpful that not adding new steps or being ineffeicent. The control board needs to be simple because of its small shape.
Making a simple control board would be incredibly complicated if we wanted to have steps as steps are generally fairly complicated. However steps are essential to both the development of the machine and to the points that we will get. We are aiming for seventy-five steps and we only have seventeen. It is essential that we continue to add steps and to test them. We need to both have a multitude of steps and for them all to be robust enough to withstand transport to the White Plains High School.
One of the best ways to develop the control board is to use string and weights that are linked to the ends and the fronts of the other elements. The pegboard is good for uses such as this and just as importantly is easy to employ for such uses. We could have this count as a number of steps, bringing far closer to our goal of seventy-five.
The pegboard that we are thinking of using for the control board is currently employed as a table leg for part of our machine. It could become a control board in its current position, however it is vertical as stated earlier and therefore could present some challange versus a horizontal board such as the larger one that it holds up. There are however plans for the horizontal one and turning it into a control board could easily interfear with those plans.
To sum up the above a control board would be an incredible asset if it was simple and added steps to the machine. The best way to accomplish this with the unfortunately vertical board would be to use the existing pegs to set up weights that would be set off by the end of one element and begin another. A control board would be additionally helpful by having a single area where we could see what went wrong with less work. We will see where the concept of the control board leads us at our eighth meeting later.