Conclusions
Our design came out extraordinarily well. We accomplished all of our goals, it looks great, and we are very proud of the mechanical components we added to make everything work! We were stressed for time, so we should have done much more work earlier, especially when every other team was using the makerspace right when we wanted to. A few design hurdles were noticed at T-minus 3 days, but with dedicated work and though Michelle and I overcame these hurdles. The three of us did tremendous work and learned a lot of valuable lessons through the design and build process of our mechanism.
Commentary
Our original design had a snapping motion from a Geneva mechanism and several springs. However, this upward snapping motion had to be pretty powerful as the portion that needs the most torque is the last portion of the snap. This led to the coin being "thrown up" back out of the mouth. We could have designed around this problem, either by fine-tuning the tongues action to throw the coin backwards on the upward journey, by having an upper jaw that would direct the coin back into the throat, or having a more clip-in like interface for the coin to be slid into instead of just on top of the tongue.