Week 15 and 16: Machine Design
This week's tasks:
- Group assignment:
- Actuate and automating our machine
- Documenting the group project and our individual contribution
- Link to the Group Assignment Page
Outcomes:
- Without experiencing this week's task, I could never know how much effort, considerations and thought could be behind designing and building a machine no matter how simple it is.
- Gaining more experince of working in group especially with very nice and collaborative people :-)
- Gaining skills in defining the problems and finding solutions to them.
- Witnessing how design improves through constant iterations of defining, ideating, prototyping and testing stages.
A word about this week's task
As one could see from our group page, we decided to make an automatic fruit peeler. Accomponied with Megumi iwata, Marta Cortes Orduna, Peetu Virkkala and Heidi Hartikainen we made a 5 member group. All the process of the machine design and building is documented in detail in our Group Page. So in this page, I only mention different stages of the process and my contribution to it.
Brainstorming
The first stage that we went through was brainstorming and discussing together the possible ideas. After we decided to continue with fruit peeler (which was originally apple peeler), we continued brainstorming using sketches on the whiteboard to analyze the machine and to figure out what parts the machine consists of and what pieces we need to make. And what are the mechanical functionality of the machine and each piece by itself.I attended in the brainstorming sessions that we had.
Ideating
After each test and each failure, we had to ideate new solutions and discuss them.Designing and Making Pieces
I collaborated with some other members in making some pieces of the machine such as:- The blade
- The spring
- The bowl for placing under the blade so that the peels of the fruit fall there and do not wet the machine.
- Redesigning the bowl after some changes to our design and rebuilding it.
Good to mention that for the sake of not wasting material, in all the stages we tried to reuse the material that we already had or made. So keeping it in mind could make the design more challenging considering the amount of material that we have and then designing.
Shopping
I collaborated in buying fruit for testing the machine.Documenting
- Taking pictures, editing them and uploading and organizing them in our page.
- Writing briefly about some pictures or process.
