Week of November 23rd

This week proved to be very difficult for us. We had to have some major re-considerations after finding out that there would no mdf available. It was even more heartbreaking when we learned that acrylic would be our only material that we could laser cut. Having spent all of our $100 budget, we did not know what we should do. We ended up just cutting the front faces and the doors of the vending machine out of acrylic. We later abandoned the acrylic door idea since the acrylic was too thin. The acrylic also cracked when we screwed into it so we needed to find another way of assembling. We went back to the tool shed and made the remaining parts of the machine out of left over wood. The biggest re-design we faced this week however was the reload system. We had to 86 the system since we had conflicts with our springs and space on the top of the machine. Since we couldn't laser cut the materials that we wanted, the vending machine is not coming out as nice as we would want it to be. Another issue is the distance sensors being very inconsistent and not working at times. We have a lot of problems right now but we hope to fix them all by Thursday.