Week Nine

This weeks assignments

Mandala machine

The basic design and idea.

My part in the project was pretty much helping out with designing the machine, and the working on the gears and motors that would contribute to rotating the bed. I made the bearing unit, the gears + belt and assembling everything nicely togeather and testing it out.

The first idea we got was to build a machine with a rotary bed and a gountry. We had already built one axis and played around with it, but we needed to advance on the idea.

Once the idea had been formalized we needed to figgure out a few practical things, like was the motor going to turn the bed by it self or were we going to gear it. How was the bed going to be made, where would the bed sit relative to the motor/gear + belt etc.

It was decited that the motor could possibly not work without it being geard down, since it would probably turn too fast. So I went out to both find a method that would function like a bearing, also to make the gear ratio.

The gear ratio was decided 1:2 and the gear function in inkscape used. The gears were calculated have an angular pitch of 1mm and 80mm circumfrence for the smaller one and 160mm for the bigger one, which meant the same amount of teeth. This was all acomplished within inkscape.

We decided to have the rotary bed on a standalone unit so it could be calibrated more easily.

After a few trial and errors, everything looked fine and the gears and the belt seemed to coincide nicely. Now the thing left to do was to fasten the motors to the frame and the larger gear to the rotary bed. The inital idea was to engrave a place in the rotary bed and make a key. After some thinking it was decited to just glue it stuck with a glue gun. The bearing is a flathead nut, something you would see on a piece of furniture, and a bolt, so not really a bearing but rather a spacer.

After a lot of time assembling, glueing, and piecing things togeather we finally arrived to the end point of being able to test the machine.