Week 9 & 10

Machanical & Machine Design - The Machine that Makes...huh?

Before we start to build our MTM, the students in our lab this year had reached consensus - we wanted to build something weird yet useful (not mandatory)

Spoiler Alert...

No, I am going to tell you what we made anyway.

Despite this is not what we intended to build at first, we managed to finish a foot acupuncture massage machine, MTM

You can find all the details of building this MTM (last M for massages) on our lab page.

My role on the team

  1. mechnical design - anything other than the stages
  2. electronics testing
  3. procurement - I bought stuffs and I love it.
  4. video filming and editing

Mechanical Design

In the beginning, our plan was to make a “hair-milling machine” with modified delta mechanism, that the tool should always point to the center of a sphere, not parallel.

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Conceptual demo with live Homo sapiens 2

Calculation & simulations 3

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The calculation proved that our concept of making a mechanism that always points to the center is possible...

ONLY ON PAPER

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We made few iterations, only to realize the mechanism was not going to work (at least within two-week project time frame)

Reason for that is the mechanics itself provide extra contraint than we acutally need.

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Anyhow, we still got this non-parallel delta structure, so we decided to make use of this - make it a foot massage machine.

Machine Design

For the control part, at the beginning we planned to stick with Gestalt.

So I made a fab net board (Bas ver.)

However, after successful node test, when we tried to link all the nodes together,

It seemed we somehow fried 3 out of 4 gestalt we had.

I tried to figure out which part was down, it turned out to be it was the Atmega 328P burnt.

Luckily we have Arduino Mega and RAMP v1.4 in our lab, so we can still managed to drive the machine just like a delta printer.

We used Fusion 360 to generate "path" for the massage machine, which was actually a 3D object, just like normal 3D printing do, we slice the file and sen the GCode to the machine.

So this the short super condensed version of our machine building story. You can check out the files and design in our lab page.

MTM 2.0 (2nd m for massages)

Actually massage machines are not something totally weird, you can find series of different designed machines on the market. Yet this project reminds me of something, that for now most of the massage machines are not adaptive, which means they run on pre-programmed patterns. What if we add sensing ability like visual or EMG signals to a massage machine? And what if usual machines in our daily life have these ability to sense and adapt to the users and environment? These are questions too big to cover within the Fab Academy, yet I am eagered to discover them.


JC Chang
Fab Academy 2016
台北匪類 FabLab Taipei, Taiwan