10. Mechanical Design¶

This week I worked on designing a machine with a group.

In this week, I worked with Angelina Yang, Kabir Nawaz, and Alana Duffy. We decided to make a claw machine

Stepper Motors¶

Since we wanted to have the claw move on X and Y axes (and eventually make the claw move on the Z axis), we chose to use stepper motors due to their precision.

When I initially tried to program them, I did not know where to start, so I followed this tutorial. It detailed how to program the motors to move using a CNC Motor Shield on an Arduino Uno.

Luckily, our lab already had all of the components we needed to make the motors function: a CNC shield, a 12V power supply, wires to connect to the shield, and stepper motors (Creality 42-34).

The CNC shield was able to be placed directly on the pins in the Arduino Uno. I then checked the minimum voltage drop for the corresponding motor drivers, which was approximately 8.5V. I changed it to approximately 8.6 V using a flathead screwdriver and checked the voltage with a multimeter.