10. Mechanical Design and Machine Design

This week I started to work on Mechanical and Machine Design with my group members. We have decided to build a modular XY Plotter Drawing Robot that allows us to mount on IKEA photo frames (irregardless whether it is portrait or landscape mode) and draw images/vector lines that we have uploaded into the program.

You can access the group assignment HERE.

Modular XY Plotter Drawing Robot

The XY plotter drawing robot is not something new and has been done by many makers. However, we are kind of interested in the process of replicating a similar XY plotter drawing robot of our own but with something new - Versatility & Modularity. Personally I think it will be nice if we could think of a way to make it into a consumer product whereby people can just buy them off the shelf, easily assemble & mount the XY plotter drawing robot without the needs of having an extensive knowledge of programming and technical skills. We then thought that it may be a good idea that our XY plotter drawing robot can be easily mounted onto standard size photo frames and allow users to simply draw on it.

Planning & Execution

Another reason why we have decided on building a XY Plotter Drawing Robot is due to the fact that we happen to have all the components (Stepper Motors, Cable Belts etc.) readily available in our lab and this is a huge deciding factor for us as our group members do not have the luxury of time to go about in getting components not to mention we already have difficulty in scheduling a common time for meeting and working together. Nonetheless, we are all commited to find a common timeframe whereby all of us can come together and work together!

We then split our jobscope after coming out with the working plan and schedule because we only have 4 slots of common day (out of 2 weeks) whereby all of us are free to come together and work on this project. The project was split into 4 segment whereby each of us have a specific duty and task to do:

• Bart - In-Charge of overall set-up and video making
• Juliana - In-Charge of electronics and cable management
• Seh Yong - In-Charge of coding and getting references
• Willie (me) - In-Charge of creating the model and fabrication processes

So my task is to conceptualize and design a modular XY plotter drawing robot since I am an Industrial Designer. I began to design them on Rhino 3D and I actually did 2 version whereby the first prototype is to test out whether our drawing robot works and draw while the second prototype is something closer to what we have envision our drawing robot will be. You can see the differences of the drawing robot versions in the images below:

Below are more images on how our drawing robot will look like in the final development phase while mounted on photo frames.

For more information on our Modular XY Plotter Drawing Robot, please refer to our Group Assignment page.

You may also download the 3D CAD file HERE and have a look at our working prototype of XY plotter Drawing Robot in action!

Reflection

This week assignment on Mechanical Design and Machine Design is really tough as our group faces issues on the programming and processing part of the XY plotter drawing robot which took us many days to solve. As mention in our group assigment page, we actually took references from a current project however, we are not very sure about the program and how it works. Our group members really tried many ways and did many rounds of troubleshooting just to solve the stepper motor programming part and get it moving according to our requirement. Previously, it was drawing distortly and in the wrong XY direction. Nonetheless, our group still manage to get our drawing robot to draw correctly (I would say 90% correctly) but there is still room for improvement and hopefully we can refine our XY plotter drawing robot into something that we can actually package it into a product.