Pancake Art Machine
Two weeks of group assignment for machine making.(week2) Our team decided to make a Pancake Art Machine :P Our work consisted of 3 different parts,
- Machine Design and Making
- Electronics
- Programming
Machine Design and Making
In this post, I want to focus more on the part that I have had most trouble with, syringe casing.
Below are materials that we used: Syringe, Crepe pan, 3 stepper motors, StepStick Stepper Motor Driver, and materials in Fablab Aachen.
First, I took the connecting part from Syringe with the big frame. To get a rough idea about how should I connect to them, I googled and got a lot of images, then later I found a useful design on syringe pump motor in Instructables and tried to modify the design based on this. Since Syringe that we are going to use is larger than syringes which are used for medical use (as it should contain good amount pancake mix so as to make pancake), and also the length of the supporting rods and motor seemed quite long, for me it was a bit of a trouble to image how it will going to be like at the end. Anyway I tried to stick to a measurement, and it turned out that is fits well with the bigger part.
Regarding machining the Design, I went through two steps, First I started to print two or three parts out using 3D printer, and it failed because holes for holding syringe and rods were too tight.. At the end we managed to drill and modify them so that holes get bigger but it was not satisfactory. and we found a need for modifying design in a way of connecting holders. I could also go on with 3d printer, but it took so long as I think and we were running out of time. So I switched to a laser cutter as Marcel advised.
Then I tried first with 3mm of cardboard but it was too thin and weak even though I stacked them. so I cut them with 4mm, and made a connecting part. and finally attached them into a bigger frame!
Below is result from the assignment.