Week Fourteen
Assignment
Our Team
Introduction
Our task for this week was to build a 'Machine'. It was really exciting because this will be the first time everyone in our lab will be working a single project collectively. It was so much fun trying to bring out everyone's crazy ideas and this could be the first week where we will be applying more than two process in our lab apart from the final project.
After much discussion we planned to make a machine which could fetch us the components from our fab inventory when we ask for them.At times I find it difficult to locate the components myself and it's always difficult for our youngest maker Sarang to get the components in the upper racks.SO there was our brilliant idea to make our own Inventory management system which will be called FIMS.
The whole work ws devided between groups in whick me and jogin will be taking care of the designing and Assembly section,Justin and Hari will be taking care of the machining section, Salman and Suhail will be taking care of the electronics and programming section.Apart from this everyone will be helping each other in every stages from ideation to prototyping.
Mechanical Design
Me and Jogin worked on the initial design ideation.
And we came up with a half rail based and half belt driven system intead of a completely belt driven system.The idea was to use maximum components from inventory and we only had a small piece of the timing belt left in our lab. Also, there could be a some vertical force on the belts as well, due to the weight of the end effector module.So we thought to use a rail system for the horizontal movement. Before designing one overselves we first refered many rail systems and mechaniacl systems developed in Fablab.We really liked the Chamfered Rail System and Core[X,Y] system . Chamfered rail system require shopbot to mill the components and was time consuming. So we made a design which could be easily manufactured using laser cutting process.
The main components that we have to design are:
The whole project was designed in Fusion 360 and each coponents for 3D printing, Laser cutting and CNC were exported seperately.
Linear rails and gears
End effector
Stepper Holder
The shelf for components
Prototyping the linear rail
The mechanism seems fine and we planned to go on with this design.
The end effector
The end effector should have a mechanism within itself to retrieve and supply the components. We designed a simple rack and pinion system for this purpose which could be easily lasercut and could be operated using a simple geared mini motor.This one also holds the provision to attach the timing belts.
Download the End effector design for 3D printing here.
Download the complete STEP design here.
Stepper holder
This one is used to hold the two stepper motors which will control the movement of the machine. It will also include the holes for the linear tubes for vertical movement and its bushes.
Download the design files for 3D printing here.
The shelf
The shelf will hold all the component boxes. The designed linear rails will be attachedd to this shelf.
Download the STEP files of the shelf here.
Assembly
Download the complete assembly file here.
Components in action.
Electronics and programming
Electronics and programming was done by Salman and Suhail and you can read more about it in their doccumentation.
