Fab Academy 2014

Week 13: Mechanical Design, Machine Design

Instructor Assignment: design or modify a machine, making as many of the components as possible document the group project and your individual contribution make the passive parts and operate it manually

Student Assignment: do the mechanical design for your final project

Initially my final project did not involve any mechanics, but after speaking with my Fablab remote instructor she suggested that I use a motor or something to integrate mechanics into the final project. So I came up with the idea of using a stepper motor to rotate a platform that the LED Cube that sits upon.

Below are some videos on how stepper motors work:

I decided to go with a 4-Phase 12VDC Unipolar Stepper Motor that we had in our FabLab inventory so I pulled the datasheet to see the wiring diagram.

Here is the mechanical design of the housing for the motor and other components

Led Cube.svg

Led Cube.stl