Although, we are super stoked at the progress made in such little time designing, building and automating a 3 axis machine our results were somewhat cranky. We we're using 24 volts of power in the end we think because the motors are still finding a lot of resistance due to our alignment problem.
In the next iteration several might be changed/improved basically to get a more stable machine and structure, and to make it more functional.
Few things to change:
- Build first the wood structure, without any whole or joint, just gluing the material needed. Then mill it once dried, so that all the wholes are done on a one final piece. This was critical to us as we first did all the wholes in all pieces, and then glued them. We found a few problems of alignment that result into difficulties to align the final structure and therefore to move the whole system.
- Improved system for the gliders. Another important thing to be improved would be to create a pressure system so that the gliders were really tight.
- Elements should be 100% parallel and straigth. This could be improved with firs point in this description, but also using a more precise way to fix the moving system to the structure, so it doesn't move.
- Use bigger screws (6mm metric min.). The screws we used were too small and therefore there were too short as well. Finding the right screws would make everything easier.
- Implement a gcode interpreter by ourselves, instead of using Chilippr gcode (Grbl workspace). Using an online tool gave us some problems so we think it would be better to have a python interpreter that could send the gcode directly to the machine.
Apart from that we think might be interesting to do a second iteration with these other things:
- Interchangeable heads. We would like to have different heads so that the machine could be used for different purposes. We thought of having a marker, a milling drill for small objects and an engraving tool.
- Second thing will be to work on the modularity of the rails, so that they can be joined the ones with others if you want to grow the machine. We worked on this concept in our first trial machine, but then forget about it in the second one. We found this could be a good point for labs where they have different needs (fairs, etc)