Week 11 - Machine Building
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Machine Building - Solar drawing machine
This documentation is part of the Solar drawing machine project. Our solar tracker XD uses sunlight to engrave a substrate with a low melting temperature [wax]. Sensed by four LDR, a stepper Motor and a servo will control the build plates positioning towards maximum light intensity. A Fresnel Lens will bundle the incoming solar rays which are reflected by a mirror perpendicularly towards the machine bed. A second lens will allow final focusing of the beam. The bed runs on two axes enabling the 2D solar engraving of the substrate.
In the end, I went for a simple design, which looked like this:
The parts where laser cut from 6 mm acrylics, using 4 % for speed and 100 % for frequency and power. The magnifying lens is fixed with nuts and bolts, so that its position in z can be adjust to the focul length of the fresnel lens. In order to fix the orientation of the lens parallel to the fresnel lens, adapter from PLA were 3D printed.
