Today, the group has split into two. The rails and switches side, and the engines and power side.Me and Edrian are in charge of building up our engines, a job which looks like will be a lot of fun but will probably be quite tricky.
Lucy and Tim are going to be in charge of switches and rails, so that we once we have our engines up we can really have this whole system up and running. So far we are looking at making our engines from empty coke cans, its a material that I already foresee as potentially having some issues with as they are not made from very strong metal and it doesn't take much to bend and distort the framework. I don't really know all that much about Stirling engines as they are a relative new concept to me, but from what I gather they run on heated air being moved around a container. Lucy seems to have done a bit of research into it though which helped me understand a bit more how they work which was good and I'm sure that that will probably make overcoming any issues we have slightly easier.
As for the rails, Tim and Lucy have looked at creating a sort of pinball rail type design, using 2 wires placed a specific distance apart and link together in an arch underneath. The ball then actually sits on top of the rails and set on an angle rolls toward its destination. Basically we rely on gravity to deliver the messages to their destination but need the engines first to bring the capsules to the top of the rails before they are going anywhere. I have a pretty good idea on how we would do that, basically by using a design not dissimilar to how a bike works. Basically there are 2 gears with a chain attached with the bottom gear being rotated by our engines. Attached to the chain are a number of buckets or cups that our capsules fit into and get lifted up to the top. A pretty simple idea but really our most efficient way of getting the height we need.
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