9 & 10. Machine building¶
The Mysa Automata¶
The Mysa Automata: the making off¶
Training a young dog comes with many challenges. Mysa is a mixed breed: half golden retriever and half Siberian husky. In short: a Goberian. Some days she’s a sweet and lovely as a golden, some moments as stubborn as a husky. But we love her, of course we do!
She’s one and a half years old, which means she hit puberty. Puberty in dogs means that it can seem that they forgot their whole basic training. Sitting, laying down and coming out when you call her: nope, none of them work. Add this on top of the husky stubbornness and well, you have a handful 🙂
Read our full documentation on our group page here.
Personal work¶
As a small team, lots needed to be done. To get started we decided I would take care off:
- the design of the box
- the cookie mould (3D-design => print => vacuform)
- soldering
1/ The design of the box
Designing the box¶
The design op the box was made in Illustrator. It’s a simple design based on an old computer console you find at ESA or NASA. A simple design with a flat bottom and a beveled top. In the top plate we put 5 holes, these are the holes that will have a small lid that will be opened by the lever system inside. This system will hold the cookies.
In the back plate there are quite a few holes as well:
- 5 holes for the toggle switches to tell the arduino which lift is loaded and which isn’t
- 4 holes for the DIN connectors that will power and lit up the big arcade buttons for Mysa to press on
- 2 holes: one for the cable to power the machine on and off/load the programme onto the arduino and one for selecting a specific programme
We cut the box in left-over hardboard to do the first tests on and double check if everything wat ok. A few small adjustments were made:
- one fewer hole on the front panel
- a few adjustments to the holes in the back
- the bevelled edges were made flat and we took out most of the tabs on the top plate in order to have the top plate rest on the rest of the box to be able to open the console
All steps were very carefully overviewed…
In the end we made the box in see-through plexiglass, cause really the LEGO insides are too beautiful to hide!
Designing the lid¶
In order for Mysa not to be able to grab a cookie before the level comes up, we needed lids. As we made a lot of face shields in PET earlier during the corona crisis, we had a lot of left-over PET we can use for this.
We used a simple round lid with a small flexcut which will be pushed open by the lever system underneath.
We had to test a few times in orde to have as little flex as needed to make it work. More flex means more machine time and that’s to be avoided when not necessary. Working together with lots of kilometers apart, this meant a lot of talking to the computer and coming up with inventive ways of testing.
To test the lid, Isabel build used here laptop stand as a base. The laptop and keyboard acted as a clamp to hold the lid while manually operating the lever system over the edge of the desk. Home engineering! It made us laugh a lot, which we believe is necessary to come up with a good build.
Attempt tree was to good one. Third time’s a charm, right?
With the lids done, it was time to go for the next step.
Designing the buttons¶
Years ago we bought big LED arcade buttons to make something big and never got to it. Thank god Mysa’s not a small dog!
Looking up the datasheet to have al the measurements, we’re ready to design the box to hold them.
We used the Boxmaker py script to design a small, almost scare box. The idea is that we need to be able to open up the boxes easily as it’s highly likely that Mysa will detach a wire while pushing the buttons as her excited cookie-loving self 😄
In Illustrator, we added a hole in the top panel for the button and a hole in the back for the cable to go through.
We started off by making a test button to start training Mysa before we finished the machine. Embedded programming of Mysa takes quite a while…
To attach the buttons to the machine, we used DIN connectors.
This meant soldering the cables to the connectors and documenting which cable was attached to which pin. Rechecking everything with the multimeter before attaching the cables to the buttons.
With the connectors in place at one end of the cable, we asked Nous to help us out as an extra pair of hands. He attached cable shoes to the other end of the cables which we used to slide over the connectors in the arcade buttons.
The result: four cabled arcade buttons!
Extra: the cookies¶
Mysa likes her cookies and Isabel likes baking. Put one and one together and it only makes sense to bake Mysa’s cookies at home. Making a mould to to do is the next logical step and we have to learn how to this for the Fab Academy as well.
First we need to know how big the cookies Mysa likes are.
The bone itself was made in Tinkercad. After getting it right, it was printed multiple times at once.
Once cleaned up, it’s time to use the vacuformer.
First steps:
Attach the vacuum cleaner to the exhaust and turn it on!
Afterwards, turn on the machine and look on the material to find out about the settings you need to use for the temperature and the heating time.
To make sure your pieces don’t move around while vacuforming, put them on a piece of cardboard with double sided tape and make small holes around each piece to make sure the air can be sucked out by the vacuformer.
With the pieces loaded in the machine. Adjust the two yellow knobs on the right side of the machine to set the temperature and the heating time and hit the timer countdown button on the left.
Once the timer is done, you will see that the plastic had melted and the machine will let you know by making a sound.
Move down the plastic with the handles and let the vacuformer finish. Once the mould is done, turn off the vacuum cleaner and take the mould out of the machine. Remove the 3D-prints and ta-da you have a mould to make a silicone mould from.
