Assignment

Group assignment

This week, we built a drawing machine collaborating with the AgriLab. We called it FabConnector, a drawing machine that can be operated remotely over the internet. Florent in France will move the drawing machine in Amsterdam. This is an overview of the electronics and networking part of the system.

Spiral development

1. Spiral: pen and paper remotely operated

2. Spiral: sand drawing

3. Spiral: Cleaning the slate: flatten the sand

4. Spiral: Image recognition: draw an image uploaded over the internet.

5. Spiral: Drawing an image from a web cam picture.

6. Spiral: Making it bigger for awe effect.

7. Spiral: Make a hardware remote control.

8. Spiral: Skynet: Making it sentient and control the world.

Harm mainly worked on the code and Tessel and Nathan worked on making the machine body. I focused on making small components for the machine. Nathan and I drew this rough sketch of the Z axis support system. It involved a gear, pen holder.

Then, I designed the holder and other parts using Fusino 360 and printed it out with the 3D printer. It consisted of three parts.

I made it so that any thickness of pen can be fixed onto the holder.

This is the video of the group project. It was a really fun project. I could learn a lot about stepper motors in general and how to control them. It would have been better if the group project week was for 2 weeks like last year. Then, I think we could've made more advanced machine.

The detailed group assignment can be found here.