Week10 - Machine Design

Lecture Notes

I’ve updated Week10’s lecture notes in my gitbook .

Assignment

group assignment

automate your machine

document the group project and your individual contribution

My accountability in the Assignment

In this week’s group work, I mainly do the design part of the project.

Since I lives in Guangzhou, a city more than 150 kilometers away from Fablab shenzhen, I can only make it to the lab every weekend.

So when the project started, we seprated into two groups: one responded for appearance and mechanical design, one for circuts and programming. And I was in the design group. I communicated with everyone mainly online or through facetime. Thanks to Viky Xie, Flex Ma, Lit Liao, Yixiao Zhang, Yang yang, I can finish the most challenging assignment.

I finished design work at home and went to the lab for cutting, assembling and testing.

Based on previous work in week 9, we polished our design and made our machine body components more accurate.

Our final design and cutting file is here

Automate our machine

Our group work page

We found a very useful tutorial Getting Started With Gestalt Nodes from the Fabacademy website. :)

FabNet

Fabnet is a multi-drop network, meaning that multiple modules (a.k.a. nodes) share a single set of communication wires.

Functions:

  1. Connect to PC with FTDI USB
  2. Connect to the Fabnet(Gestalt Node)
  3. Provides power at two voltages 12V-24V/7.5V

Then create a bridge board that adapts the cable to Fabnet:

Download the firmware for Gestalt Node

wxGestalt

wxGestalt is a simple IDE for controlling Gestalt nodes in Python

Machine Setup

Identify the nodes

IDE

Run the machine

And cheer for the cutting!

Enjoy it!

You can watch our video to see our machine ;)

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/164062063

You can download the code for our machine here or from box.net.