Machine design

Mechanical design, Machine design

Assignment to be done:

- design a machine that includes mechanism+actuation+automation+application
- build the mechanical parts and operate it manually
- document the group project and your individual contribution

Group assignment to be found here

Individual Assignment: Document the group project and your individual contribution

In my group we designed and build a Laser Cutter Machine
My contribution to this work was cutting all designed mechanical parts and their assembly in order to get the final working machine. Down here there are all procedures I passed through when cutting and assembling the parts toward the complete and working machine.

Above photos are the parts that have been designed in solidworks to be cutted with CNC machine and assembled to make a frame on which the laser head and ll other parts will be supported such as stepper motors,belts electronics control etc.

After having all files ready, I fixed the work piece to be cutted on the bed of my CNC shopbot machine.Here I made sure that the piece is well tighted on the bed so that will be no movement when a machine is cutting. As there was a piece of workpiece of previous work, I started by removing it.

And after fixing the workpiece on the bed, the next is to import the files into vcarve pro as the software control of our CNC machine.

Next here is setting the toolpath:Setting the tool path for a CNC machine is important because it determines the path that the cutting tool will take to machine a part or component. The tool path is a set of instructions that tell the CNC machine how to move the cutting tool in three-dimensional space to produce the desired shape and dimensions of the part.

Image below shows how the tool will move when cutting

Note that the frame of our machine has been designed in solidworks and cutted from MDF

Cutting the pieces to be used with CNC shopbot machine

Assembling the parts of our machine

Actually when assembling the machine, I started by fixing the four external parts of the machine in rectangular form!!! and made sure that they are well fitted and aligned. After this, I fixed the other smaller parts to support the belts and the laser head as well as the stepper motors for making motion or movement.

The following video has been taken when testing the movement of the laser head on its axis and operate it manually

Normally, all parts need to be fitted in order to ensure their alignment and not causing the unstraight movement of the laser head.
This is also crusial as the frame will support the heavy stepper moters. If it is not it will cause the machine to not be precised. The belts also need to be very staight and well fixed sothat the movements be not zig zag.

Then the complete laser machine after assembling:

After assembling all parts, we tested the machine wether it is working.We just took a sample by engraving the words as shown on the computer on Plywood . We encraved them on a given plywood just a test as shown in the following video.

After the hardwork, we as group successfully completed the design and build our laser cutter machine and it works as expected now and more details can be found on group page through the link I shared on the top of this page

The files can be downloaded from here

NAVIGATION

USEFUL LINKS FOR MORE KNOWLEDGE

https://randomnerdtutorials.com/ https://www.w3schools.com/java/java_intro.asp https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/br

Address

Kigali-Rwanda

+250788251334

felicalon@gmail.com