week9

ASSIGNMENTS

Mechanical Design & Machine Design

The assignments for this week were:
    - Design a machine (mechanism & automation), including the end effector.

    - Build the passive parts and operate it manually.

    - Document the group project and your individual contribution.

Fab Lab students who participated in this group project:

    -    Laura Massaglia
    -    Paulo Ayub
    -    Carla Werkhaizer

Fab Lab coordinator who advised and guided this project:

    -    Siron Cesar Pacheco Pereira

As a group, we decided on building a 2-axis drawing machine. The machine in theory would draw something following the lines of a G-code that could be generated by the FabModules. Once we had our idea in place we split up into two groups. Carla and I were responsible for setting the end effector and redrawing the motors box to use MDF instead of cardboard. We were also responsible for the assembly of each axis. Our student group was uneven and Paulo could not do the work all by himself so our coordinator Siron joined him to form the second group. Their job was to set the necessary parts to make the axis work, using the Gestalt Nodes and programing them.

Machines Used for the project:

    - G-weike 1290 Laser cutter
    - Roland MDX-40

Software used for the project:

    - Fusion 360
    - Solidworks
    - IDLE (Python GUI)
    - GIMP

Carla and I had to redraw the cardboard layout for the motor, in order to use 3mm MDF instead of cardboard. We redrew it using CorelDraw. We were able to do this by measuring and understanding the original drawing. Once we did that we were able to copy it and make a press-fit construction kit with 3mm MDF. Our laser cutter cuts using DXF files. So, we had to provide a DXF source file here.

Video link of laser cutter: https://youtu.be/lyk1usNM6lo

It took Carla and I few tries to get it right and assemble it. We also had to make some adjustments on the kerf to get a good press fit construction. As we were assembling the box we realized that some of the parts needed to be assembled first before closing the central box, where the screws go. As we continued the assembly of the machine we realized that the that the guide tubes sometimes slip while the motor rotates. We needed to fix this problem and we decided to make a new central box and glue the guide tubes to the sides (This made the guide tubes more stable). We decided together that the end defector was going to be a marker pen fixed in one of the axis. We then worked on mounting the 2-axis together

The way we decided to position each axis, we needed to design a wheel on the y axis. The Y axis would then be mounted on the X axis. We designed a wheel using the 6mm MDF and the laser cutter and a bearing. This solved our problem of the y axis being too heavy.

Paulo was responsible to study and set up the programming parts. You can check his documentation here.

Now that everything was built and we had some programing complete we made an example file with a star to load. Then we made the machine move. As you can see the machine did not draw the example file correctly but it was a great learning process. See below:

https://youtu.be/kmR2HuDtj7c