---
title: Mousetrap Vehicle
date: 2017-10-27
categories: school
excerpt: For a Physics C project, we built a mousetrap vehicle according to the SciOly rules for that year.
header:
  teaser: /assets/img/2017/mousetrap-old.jpg
---

<sub>Written 8-31-19</sub>

One of the projects we did in Physics C was to build a mousetrap vehicle that followed the SciOly rules that year. I had to work on Mission Possible and Hovercraft so I didn’t spend too much time adjusting my vehicle to be super accurate. I did get it to be pretty fast though. An unintended side effect of my design was that the aesthetics ended up being pretty on point (according to friends).

{% include figure image_path="/assets/img/2017/mousetrap-cad.jpg" %}

I designed my own wheels to reduce weight as much as possible, using tires from some wheels I bought from Pololu awhile ago. The base plate was CNC milled from the carbon fiber plate I used for Electric Vehicle.

{% include figure image_path="/assets/img/2017/mousetrap-old.jpg" %}

The goal of the mousetrap vehicle was to push a cup forward a certain and then reverse and stop at a certain point. At first I tried using one mousetrap for forward and then another for backward, which didn’t work very well. I switched back to the traditional method of using both mousetraps together and just switching the wrapping direction of the string.

{% include video id="Isw6XLnJpFA" provider="youtube" %}

{% include figure image_path="/assets/img/2017/mousetrap-donate.jpg" caption="wheels donated!" %}