Mechanical Design

My experience

A new learning experience

This week I was really looking forward to it, I knew it would be a challenge but I never really imagined I would get to build something this crazy. With the Fab Lab Peru team we chose to do a project that we had been thinking about for a while, in 2019 we wanted to provide a different experience to people traveling to Lima Peru, one of the most outstanding things in Peru is the food so we thought of giving a unique experience to people who came to try the typical Peruvian dishes, as it could not be only a conventional experience we decided to use technology to our advantage and create a machine that prepares these dishes. As a conclusion we chose a dish called "Causa Limeña", this historical dish in our city is a mixture of history and flavor since its creation was 200 years ago as a result of the fight for our independence. What better invention for this bicentennial? A causa machine! 🤩
Here is a little bit of my exploration and progress this week.

First step

Before starting with the individual explorations of the material we had some meetings with José Duarte, he is a well known Peruvian Chef who really had a lot to tell us about this well known Peruvian dish. It was a lot of fun to meet him and learn as I in particular was not yet very clear on how to go about preparing a causa that would be suitable to be served with a machine. Below I will show an exploration I did.
´

First Conclusion

The first conclusion I had was that it would be very important to get a texture that is not so difficult to extrude, if this stayed like this it could make the motors work more than they should and that was not good. To achieve this trade-off we had a lot of explorations with the whole team and finally we came to the conclusion to use some different ingredients to make the dough lighter. As a first prototype I imagined that the cause would end up like the following pictures.😃



As this machine is quite old, we first had to get it to work, so we made some adjustments and revisions to both the mechanical and electronic parts. After many tests we managed to get it to respond to our computers. Here is a moment of happiness when I was able to control it from my laptop. 🤩

Design of the machine

First attempts

In my case I had many questions regarding the design, thanks to many consensuses with the team we started sketching both by hand and in 3D to better visualize our ideas, here I show some results of my personal explorations.



Due to the complexity generated by the use of curved shapes, we chose to make the platforms hexagonal, so we had orthogonal figures that allowed us to better engage the pressfit designed for the parts to be assembled, the important thing was also to make the structure stable and support the weight of the cylinders and the system in general. Here are some pictures of the modeling I did in FreeCAD. 💪



After many design tests and meetings with the team we were able to reach a consensus that you can see in its entirety in our complete page, (click here) However the next step we had to do was to laser cut the pieces of the structure so we went looking for support since our laser is still disabled or rather still not working as we need. The material we used was 5mm polystyrene and below I show some pictures of the assembly we had to do. 💪



It is also important to mention that in all that was done we had to face many challenges, we ran out of light, the components did not fit in our pieces, we lacked material, etc. Even so we managed to do everything we set out to do and in my case I was in charge of writing in Spanish all the documentation of the week and then pass the information to my partner Walter Lenigan, he would be responsible for making the push to our group page. Additionally, I was in charge of editing our video and collecting the story of our project. 💪

Final Video

I invite you to review our video, this project has been developed in order to generate a significant invention in an important year for our country, the causa limeña is a dish that in this 2021 celebrates 200 years of creation, what better way to celebrate than creating a machine using all the current technology that revalues the process of its preparation and is also served in a fun way?

New gastronomic project

On this occasion, I also had the opportunity to be part of the team that made a new gastronomic project; “La picaronmaker”, we definitely like food very much. 🥰🥰

Picarones are ring-shaped fried sweets made with wheat flour dough mixed with pumpkin, and sometimes sweet potato, bathed in flavored chancaca honey. Its origin goes back to the Spanish fritters, and it is a traditional dish of Peruvian gastronomy.

In order to recreate this process in a mechanical way, considering that this time a machine will be in charge of depositing the picarones dough in a pan, we started sketching and designing many shapes until we found the right one. 💪


To make this possible, we first discussed about the materials and components needed to make it work, we had many ideas but finally decided to use the following:

1.Controller motor module L298N
2.Arduino UNO
3.Jumper wires
4.Screws
5.Nuts
6.Power Supply
7.Aluminium Flex Shaft Coupler
8.Endless screw
9.Stepper motor
10.PETG filament
11.MDF