George the Rhino

Final 2

Gabriel Piessens and 2 OthersCharlie Minney
Alexander Schimmel

Our vehicle is a state of the art car that can drive extremely fast, but, this vehicle is no sports car! No, it's George The Rhino! George is a special model of the super duper fast, ball shooting, horn ramming soccer car! Yes, you heard me right George is a soccer car!

Our original idea was just a simple rocket league car that rammed soccer balls and hoped to score a goal. After some thinking, we realized that it was too bland, too easy. So we amped it up a bit by adding a rhino theme. We meant to add a rhino head trailing flame on the side but, that's just a design. Nothing hard or complicated. So of course, being the teenage boys that we were, we added crossbows. Yeah, crossbows. Makes sense on a rhino, doesn't it? We planned on a conveyor belt to hold mini crossbows that rained down on our enemy's. There was only one problem. We had no enemies; we were just your average soccer car. So we changed it to just one crossbow because it was cool. We still had no enemies though so eventually the crossbow turned into a ball shooter under the excuse of attempting to control the ball. The first idea was a funnel that the balls sat in and one at a time they would go down the chute and get punched by some mechanism. This approach changed to it shoots from the side because the horn was in the way. It then changed to a funnel that was right above the ball shooter. This idea made it much easier, but it didn't work out so well. Then came the brainstorming of how to fix the problem. We came up with the idea of the chamber or magazine attached to the shooter. The result was a box with a ramp in which the balls would rest. When they fell into a small section at the front of the box, a solenoid would punch the ball sending it shooting forward and (hopefully) hitting the ball.

The design of George the Rhino changed a lot over the time we had. The first model wasn't a rhino at all, and it was more or less a big mess, but that was just the first prototype; however, the first model gave us the idea to base the car after a rhino in the first place. We were designing the second prototype when we ran into some problems. We couldn't decide on what ideas to add to George and what not to add. There was an idea of a booster on the back, a crossbow, and much more. Everyone kept giving us new ideas and advice, and we all got very confused and frustrated. This minor setback lost us about a day, but we got back on track quickly. We finally decided on the ball shooter, a ramming mechanism on the front, and paddles to control the ball, and we quickly designed and built our second prototype. As we thought, there were many errors; however, this did not set us back. We kept finding and fixing the mistakes until everything was ready in the design. We assembled George the Rhino in 3D, just to make sure everything worked. We laser cut the new model out of thin wood, and there were still one or two things we missed. We quickly fixed those and assembled and attached the wheels and motors. We added the electronics and built the ram and attached it. 

FINAL

Gabriel Piessens and 2 OthersCharlie Minney
Alexander Schimmel