First Prototype of Clown Mechanism

This was our initial design. It shows an initial upward motion from the right loop, an arching semi-circle path from the center circle and a catching a falling motion on the left. This can be better visualized by the animation found here. The dot on the red segment would be connected to one arm, and the mirrored dot on the green segment would be connected to the other. The middle blue segment would be transparent and would represent the air above the clown's head. Initially we planned on having a funnel for an input with a servo acting as a valve letting one marble in at a time. The output would be passive ramp. Due to a lack of time, we never ended up implementing the funnel.

For the first prototype we built half of the mechanism to test the joints. We built it out of 1/8" acrylic laser cut to the right lengths. We didn't have any mechanism to actually hold the balls but we quickly realized how difficult it would be to accomplish. Initially we wanted to have small cups transfer the marbles between them, but that proved to be too unreliable. We did find however, that the laser cut acrylic held together by screws with nylon lock nuts was an excellent way to hold the mechanism together. There was low friction and the links stayed in plane like we wanted.