The Rube Goldberg Machine: The Yummi Nummies

The Rube Goldberg Machine that my group and I made is called the “Yummi Nummies”. This invention of ours is significant because it helps solves the problem of having to feed pets. It can be used for many different animals in need of being fed. For example, Yummi Nummies can be very productive in zoos. This machine can shrink the chance of a zookeeper from getting hurt if he were to bring in the food to a wild animal’s cage. This machine is not simply only used for zoos, this machine can also help everyday people feed their pets they have at home. That was originally why we made this machine, to allow people to feed their animals with just one motion. No matter what animal it is or how much animals you have, this machine can benefit you. This
machine is automatic, you start it by dropping in a marble, and your job is done. It is that easy and simple!
Our machine is complicated to make but simple looking. If you were to just look at it, you would think that all we did was stuck cardboard together. It seems like something that can be done in 5 minutes, but it actually took us quite a while. For one thing, we needed accurate measurement so that our machine can work. It took us hours of measuring to make sure our machine worked as well as we wanted to. The other challenging part was actually making our sketch come to life. Drawing a plan is fast and easy, when it comes to the building, it is quite difficult, so we had to do rearrangements and adjustments for our machine to work well. In the end, it worked though. While making adjustments, we had to make sure that we weren’t excluding all of our simple machines. We had to make sure we included at least 4 simple machines. In this machine, we have a total of 5 simple machines, the pulley, a wheel and axel, the inclined planes, the lever, and lastly the wedge.

Our pet feeder machine is actually really simple to use.
The first thing that you must do is to drop a marble inside the pulley machine. When the marble has dropped into the pulley, the side of the pulley with more force will go down and the one with the least weight will go up. The pully starts out with potential energy, however it changes to kinetic energy because of the force of the marble. The weight of the marble makes the pulley change its position. When the side with more force of the pulley fell towards the ground, it tapped the wheel and axel, and the wheel and axle began spinning. The wheel and axel’s spinning gently triggers the toy car in potential energy to travel down the inclined plane and change into kinetic energy. As quickly as the car fell, it stopped right in front of the lever. The lever has potential energy and it is there to prevent the car from going on and on. When the car stops at the lever, the car pushes the lever with a little bit of force, which triggers the marble to roll out into our second pulley. Our second pulley works similarly to our first pulley. The input force is where the marble falls in and the output force is when the other bucket falls down because of the movement. In this last stage, where the food comes out, the pulley with the heavier weight in it goes down about evenly to the food side of the bucket. The food side of the bucket tilts and all the food rolls down the inclined plane. It rolls down and lands into the food tray, and
now the animal(s) are fed. During the process of making our pet feeder, we took account into what simple machines we would use. We were aware that in order to make this project we would need at least 2 pulley sets, otherwise the whole process would have to change, so that was final. Then, based off of our drawn plan, we decided that we should also keep the inclined plane and wheel and axle. However, the screw was hard to incorporate into our machine, so we took that out. Now we need one more simple machine. Looking back to our sketch, we decided to replace the lever somewhere else. We did that and it worked out well. As we were putting it onto the platform we were using, we realized that each section itself wasn’t going to work well so to hold it up we used wedges, which increase the number of simple machines we used from 4 to 5.
In conclusion, our machine, the “Yummi Nummies” can easily help someone feed their pet in a quick motion.
All that is required of the person is to drop a marble into the first bucket so that everything can be triggered. In this simple machine, there are 5 different types of simple machines. Each one has different purposes. For example, the inclined planes in our machine allowed objects to roll down a slanted platform more easily than a straight platform. The wheel and axle and pulleys were used to trigger different objects. In our machine, the wedge and lever is used to hold things up. The wedge’s purpose was to allow the inclined planes to stay up in the right position. The lever was used to hold up the car; it prevented the car from continuously running down. Our machine is also very simple to run, even though when you explain it in words it sounds really complicated. This machine has many triggers to start many parts of the machine so that the machine can run smoothly. Overall, our machine was a
success!