Fab Academy 2015
How to make almost anything

Luis Peña Mendoza

    Assignment 14 - week 14 - May 20

    make a machine, including the end effector build the passive parts and operate it manually document the group project and your individual contribution. Automate your machine, document the group project and your individual contribution

    Mechanical Design - Machine Design

    WORKFLOW To start with this weeks group assignment we identify four main activities: downloading and understanding the files, machining the necessary parts for the project, programming the gestalt and finally testing the machine. All of this depending upon the kind of machine we wanted to make. For this we decided to build a FOAM CUTTER machine as got inspired with the Slashbot example. We assume that understanding this as an exercise will help us in future projects. Making a team work wasn't really dificult as all of the FAB LAB TECSUP students had a "forte" and we distribute work according to this. We have divided this presentation in two parts: one that explains the cardboard machine used as a Foam Cutter and an other one where we use the gestalt node to move a MTM that was out of use in our laboratory. CARDBOARD MACHINE The Card Board Machine work has been divided in two faces: hardware and software. The hardware stage being all the tangible things like the cardboard construction and the electronics production that form the machine. And a software stage being the programming and interface development to control and manipulate the machine. Hardware Below you can see a summary of the procedure necessary to download, internalization and understanding of the original design and production as well as the modification of it according to our material using grasshopper. Once we understood the behavior of the cardboard boxes with the mechanisms and having decide to use generating motion in axes X and Z we create a wooden stand to suport the structures. You can see below the wooden stand design that we created to hold the cardboard boxes, for this we took advantage that the axes of movement of metal were bigger sticking out of the boxes and this was used to adapt the boxes and the wooden stand without using screws or glue. Software Regard to the software of our machine we proceeded to download Nadya and Imoyer's files, perform the installation pygestal-master as the Fab Academy tutorial. The interface enables the cutting machine, with MOVE command starts to execute the court of the word FabLab, such as photos shown. I worked in the interface, The cardboard machine.