Make OH/IO 2019

Recently I had the opportunity to participate in a makeathon (a hackathon but focused on hardware) called Make OH/IO with two of my roommates, Spencer Christian (Linkedin) and Kwangeon Kim.

We wanted to make a voice activated toy that would launch marshmallows into the air (so that you could catch them in your mouth), unfortunately between the 3 of us we had little to no experience with electrical engineering. Two of us are CSE majors and the other an Aerospace engineering major.

Nevertheless, we decided to see what we could accomplish. Our initial design involved creating a catapult (seen below) to launch these marshmallows. However after a brief deliberation we decided to instead use two spinning wheels to launch (we believed this would allow for better accurracy and further distances).

After a series of successes and failures we developed a (somewhat) working prototype, seen below, where the wheels would be activated through voice control and drop a marshmallow (yes, drop, not launch).

Unfortunately, over the next few hours our raspberry pi microphone began to fail (and would eventually just stop working) which resulted in a loss of voice control. However, we developed a stand for the wheels to sit on which allowed the marshmallow to be (sort of) launched and that rounded out our 24 hour making marathon.