March Madness

Hello!

The PHS Inventeam has had so much progress over the past month and we are honored to say that we were invited to Open Conference 2017 by VentureWell. We have had lots of success prototyping and 3D printing many of our new parts.

Our 3D printer hard at work

Regarding the intake, we have renewed our design to accommodate a large range of error when inserting bills and have added motorized hinges that will align bills when the currency is inserted. We have also integrated an intake roller on the new design.

The new 3D printed intake with guide hinges

In terms of the identification, we decided to implement a moving scanner to identify bills instead of bills moving through the scanner. This moving scanner will have an ambient light sensor and a UV light to accurately find the location of the UV strip. This eliminates the need to know the positioning of the bill and ultimately will make the product more accurate.

Moving ambient light sensor for identification 

We have also made a CAD model of how the intake, identification, and sorting parts of our device will fit together and plan to implement the solution in the next month. We also wrote the code to move the sorting arm up and down to the different slot heights. The sorting arm has gone through several different designs, each improving on the last, and our final design includes a rubber roller and motor for easier feeding.

The orange sorting arm and "wallet" (in black)

We are also trying to implement a flexible, accordion-folder storage compartment with bills fed in from the side. This allows for a foldable wallet, compared to the rigid, wide original design. A rigid piece of plastic would keep the slots in the correct positions so that sorting remains accurate.

We would like to thank Venture Well for inviting us Open Conference 2017 at the Smithsonian American History Museum in the Lemelson Wing. We proudly presented our product alongside fourteen college tech startups and made so many connections! We showed off our Money Sorter to inventors, scientists, professors and other professionals in the fields of science and technology.

Our poster for Open Conference

Please follow our on Twitter for regular updates and find out how you can help by checking out our Website!

-The Poolesville High School InvenTeam