May Madness

Hello Again!

This month has been extremely busy with us tinkering with our invention and devising new ways to improve our current device’s functionality. We’ve made large strides this month that keep us excited for the future of our project. Alongside the technical aspects of our project, there have been big changes going on with our team and its members!

During our first meeting of the month, one of our members came up with a new process of identifying bills that is supposed to conserve space and be more efficient than our previous method of identification. The new design involves the bill being inserted into a circle where it’ll continue to be pushed in a circle by a motor. On the edge of the circle, there are sensors to determine the bill denomination, then it is sorted into the wallet. This new process decreases the amount of time needed to identify and sort the bill while decreasing the chance for an error to occur in the identification of the bill.

New identification housing

Modifying the identification housing

Following the unveiling of this new method of identification, our CAD team worked hard and modeled a prototype in record time. We decided to use Shapeways again to print our device since the service offers the best prints for our budget. We are excited to see the improvements in this new model and to share the results with you at Eurekafest in less than three weeks!

Our printer working hard

Moving on from the technical aspects of our project, we would like to congratulate all the seniors on our team on their upcoming graduation! We thank them for all the hard work they have put into this project, but they’ll still be sticking with us until EurekaFest, so we’ll still get some quality time with them!

Additionally, we would like to thank everybody who has donated to our project these past few months. All in all, we have received over $10,000 in donations, which is way more than we ever expected. And we would like to give special thanks to the generous couple that donated a huge amount totaling more than $9000! Thank you so much to everyone who has donated to our project and we hope you’re excited to see the results of our work!

We only have 15 days left till EurekaFest and we can’t wait! Thanks for all the support and we’ll make sure to include all of our adventures at EurekaFest in our next blog post, but in the meantime keep up with our project on our website and follow us on our Twitter!

-The Poolesville High School InvenTeam