15. Mechanical design group project¶
Group Work/Brainstorm
We began by getting together as a whole class and sitting down with a big white board in front of us. From there we had to think of good ideas to make for our group project, we all had the thought of making something useful, to put in our lab. We needed to create something that we could all do together in the smoothest way possible, so there was no confusion or any stressful communication. Soon after we had a white board full of very interesting concepts and designs and we had to take a vote on which one we should do as the final idea.The idea we ended up choosing was a vending machine for our little coffee pods hanging from the wall. The vending machine was set on a spinning platform, and a pushing system to push the coffee cups through the multiple tiny doors. There was also an area to hold the lines of coffee in tube-like containers to be dispensed out, and finally a display screen to show all the different coffee flavors and buttons to choose the prefered items. The part I worked on was the place where you reach your hand in and grab the coffee pod from, like the place the pod would end up being when the whole process was done. The area/station where the cups would be dropped into and finally grabbed by the person.
My part
For my part I needed to find out all my other teammates’ measurements and how this machine was going to be built in order to start making the drop cup/ reaching place for the coffee pods. The most important part for my design was knowing the exact height and width of the (drop cup) so I can coordinate the size to fit with everyone else’s parts and design. It took around 4 tries to complete the final product. I started with cones and funnels but during the 3D printing process they would not be supported fully with the body and would fall apart, so I needed to do a bit of technical tweaking to fix the overall structure of the (drop cup). I ended up with a more cup-like design that had extremely thick walls and a big square opening to take out the coffee cup. One big issue I had was a lot of people in my group could not fit their hand fully in my (drop cup) or not even be able to fit at all into the opening of my design. So I had to adjust that a couple times to be able to make a universal opening for the students to fit everyone’s hand and to be able to acquire their coffee cup. With the top part of my design with the main the hole on the top, I had to make it the right size to fit the cups when they fall into it. My group members decided to make little rings/napkin rings to hold the coffee pods, almost like a pod inside of another pod. So it wasn’t just the coffee cup falling it was both the ring and coffee cup. That’s why my top hole is that large on the design.
