10. Mechanical and machine design
This assignent is a group effort and the documentation for that can be found here. This page goes over only my contributions.
My contributions
- Original idea and sharing the vision
- First iteration
- 3D design of the base
- Second iteration
- 3D design using Fusion 360
- 3D printing of the designed parts.
- Participating in the assembly
- Design of the second iteration
- Video editing the presentation clip
Unless explicitly stated, all of the images and documentation on this page describe my contributions.
Idea
When we were brainstorming for ideas I came up with this crazy machine that would slice your sausages for you. I personally tend to make a lot of slices to get the best browning and crispy texture. As that takes some time to do it gave the reason for this machine to be, well, atleast slightly of use..
While we were brainstorming I illustrated my vision usign GIMP. It could basically be a longer egg plotter (which we had seen done previously by other people) with the pen replaced by a knife. Here is the humoristic illustration:
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At some point we realized it could be easier to hold the sausage vertically, like a kebab machine.
(We would later see that it needed some support from the top but that was solved nicely by Aarne)
We planned to use a stepper motor for rotating the sausage and another for raising/lowering the cutter. A servo motor would handle the cutting action. So the first step would be to have some sort of platform to mount the stepper motors.
3D design
I first designed this base for the group to print while I was away.
Other members of the group then built more on top of that.
While I had had the original vision for the machine, The first design phase by the group helped identifying key problem areas and possible fixes to those.
Images of the first iteration can be found from the group page.
After I was back again and able to contribute I took the liberty to make some heavy modifications to the design. We decided to keep the second version.
All of the white parts on the 3D model below were designed and printed by me.
More of the second design too can be found from the group page.
3D printing
I printed some of these parts I had redesigned for the second iteration.
Here is the improved base that I printed.
It took a while to print (4-6h) compared to the other parts which were all less than an hour. Of course, the printing could have been made quicker by tweaking the settings but the result here was very good.
In hindsight, the base would have been faster to make by laser cutting MDF/plywood and that could also have been even more rigid more easily. The main challenge was that we had to wait for the print to finish but there was time pressure to just make the video with the existing prototype. In the end the 3D printed part was suitable and it might look better than a laser cut box.
All of the prints didn't succeed at the first try however.
There are three parts of which only one failed and had to be re-print. This was because the one part released early from the bed but luckily it didn't ruin the other parts. I think I will favor printing parts separatedly as that has given me better results and success rate.
The process of 3D printing is documented in-depth earlier in week 5.
Assembly
The assembly is mainly documented in the group page. My part was mainly assembling the parts I made for the second iteration.
Video editing
I also made the video using OpenShot Video Editor. Here is screenshot of that.
The process was just putting clips or images one after another. And then exporting with settings which result in acceptable file size. I wanted to keep the full hd (1920x1080) resolution so I reduced the bitrate to 1Mb/s which still resulted in a file size of 7MB. Although that is relatively large I figured it's better that way.
End of week 10