The Project
This week we did a group assignment of designing a machine. We had various ideas, such as a cookie maker, a tee dipper or a pancake machine. But in the end we designed a Drawbot, wich we call the Mandala Machine. It consist mainly of one Yaxis and a spinning disk but we hope to add one more Zaxis that will lower the pen.
My Contribution
My main contribution was in brainstorming the design, we sketched up different designs and went back and forth in how it should function, how many axis we needed and so forth. to begin with I sketchep up a design where the motor would be in the center of a circular support that was laid with rotary bearings, then we moved to a belt system where the motor sits ouside of the disk. I had the idea to turn it upside down to get the disk lower and reduce the height of the rotary supports, but in the end we just made a cut out in the base plate that lowered the motor and held it in place so we did not have to worry about a support housing for the motor, come to think of it Im not sure what we gained with the belt system as opposed to attching the motor to the center of the hub, but ohh well its cool mechanics.
I followed Hafliði closely as we set up the controllerboards and tryied to keep an eye on the cardboard axis assembly. We turned one of the controller cables the wrong way so it took us some time to figure out what was wrong.
I and Vilhjálmur drew up a temporary baseplate in Fusion360 thats mobile under the y axis just to get the function right, the idea is to make another one that attaches to the struts.
Centered motor idea
Two versions of the axis placement.