Week 17

Making the auto peeler

I worked with Marta Cortes Orduna, Peetu Virkkala, Behnaz Norouzi and Heidi Hartikainen. For all the process of machine designing and building, see our group website.

Modifying the outer box

We decided to recycle the materials as much as we can. For the outer box in which the moving part fits, we decided to reuse the box which was used in the last year. The box was too big for our project, so I modified the box so that it will fit. I downloaded the files from last year's group page and kept only the vector line of the edge and deleted other lines.


I set the origin point where I wanted to cut the extra part.


I cut all the extra parts and the modified box fit finely.

Modifying joint

While testing, we came acrossed the problem of the joint part. The joint which connects stepper motor and the part which holds fruits got lose from the motor shaft. Jari showed us the special joint for stepper motor. However, it has slits and was bended by the weight of the fruits. So we decided to make two holes on the joint that we previously used and used screws to tighten it in a similar way with the special joint for stepper motor. I made two holes using the drill. However, two screws did not grab the stepper motor shaft properly. So we wrapped the shaft with tape and it worked.

This is the final result of the machine.

Here is the video of peeling.

Reflection

This week, we continued machine designing and building from last week. I contributed by modifying outer part and joint. We managed to work all the movements includes holizontal movement and rotation, but difficult part was angle and distance of the blade. When the blade gets stuck in the fruit, it stops the motor. We found out stepper motor was not strong enough. We were initially planning to add spring so that the blade automatically adjusts the distance when it touches the surface of the fruit, but keeping both flexibility and strength of the blade was not easy.