12. Mechanical, Machine Design

Group Page

To give some context, I have to say that I don't live in the same city as the rest of my team. Although I was able to travel for some days to help with this assignement, I was limited to my time there for manual work. Anyways, I will describe what I was able to help with during my time there, and the rest was the documentation on our group page.

It was great and I was so happy to meet my teammates in person. I left with an awesome experience and very amazed at the talent of each one and the awesome sum of them.

Our first machine

The first iteration of our machine had the objective of moving a microliter pipette that would absorb some biomaterials to deposite as pixelated drawings in an agar gel base.

To begin, we had to gather and measure all components to try calculating our machine's working area.

3D design and printing

With all measurements in hand, we started designing and creating the components we needed. I helped mostly with the following:

Axis cars

Stoper X axis

Stoper Z axis

At the same time, we had to think of the structre, working area and enclosure of the whole machine... While also testing, designing and producing electronics!

Laser cutting

I helped with the design of a base for the pipette syringes, samples, agar gel canvas and trash. We planned on producing it on acrilic, but tested with MDF first:

*A very important consideration for designing this base was the working area. The mechanical design and structure had to be definitive to see where the pipette would really be able to move, and therefore, where we could place the things it would interact with.

To make sure the wroking area, sizes and holes were correct, we cut out a test on MDF with the laser cutter:

My teammates worked on the rest of the structure, motor testing and final integration of the machine. Unfurtunately my time was up and I had to leave before seeing the machine finished.

And to our suprise, when the assembly was done and testing carried out... The pipette moved too much and the precission we needed could not be accomplished with this design.

This was a CRITICAL discovery, because it meant probably changing out system's position, printing new pieces or moving things around until we obtained the precission we needed.

We had to PIVOT

After some discussion with all team members, we came to the conclusion that changing the scope of the machine's purpose was best. The small amount of time left, work needed and material availability led us to this decision.

Once we had our minds set and our new objective clear, we got hands on at full speed.

Our new objective:

Making the best of our current working X & Y axis structure to change the pipette's (z) axis so that it holds a neopixel ring that can be recorded on a black background to make automated drawings. Something like this: