Week 11

Machine Design

The eleventh lecture on Wednesday April 5th was about Machine Design: machine, motion, modules, sensors, actuators, controls, file formats, interpreters, path. Assignment given by Neil for this eleventh week was closely related to the one given on nineth week (Mechanical Design): both of them make the so called "Machine Building Cycle", which basically consists in:

  • Design, build and finally automate a machine
  • Document the group project (and individual contribution)
  • Make a presentation during Fab Academy weekly review

I partecipated in ShoppinoBot Machine Project along with Fablab Cagliari team (Fab Academy instructor Francesca Mereu, Fab Academy student Marco Bianchi, and Fablab Cagliari Crew: Stefano Meloni, Giovanni Fabrizio Dessì, Daniele Poddighe, Gian Paolo Troga, Alessandra Boi)

Main Project: ShoppinoBOT Machine Building

During Week 09, I made this little experiment with a parallel project being me "the group"; even if, with my lack of engineering or computer-science school background, I managed to build some mechanical parts it was clear at this point that the experiment could not be successful without stressing too much on time management and draining up all energies -that I also had to save for the rest of Fab Academy and especially for my MailPlus Final Project :) So this was a fail due to time management issues and underestimating project complexity as a whole: I had to admit that the idea of building by myself the drawing-board machine maybe was too much for me; maybe someday I'll be back on it, in the meantime I decided to stick with Fablab Cagliari team and the shoppinoBOT machine building.

The ShoppinoBot is meant to be a compact and easy to use open-source art robot that can draw on beer bottles. The Sardinians have regional terms for the brewing sizes, from "Scioppino" that indicates the format of 20cl, to "Birroncino", the 33 cl bottle and the "plug" indicating summarily a request for beer tapped from kegs. It is possible to custom the scioppino’s label with 2- axis draw machine, hence the name of the machine: ShoppinoBOT ("Shoppino" is the english pronounce for italian "Scioppino").

My contribution to ShoppinoBOT Project was mainly as designer, and I also had small a role in workflow organizing through trello platform, and automation overview; as a designer, I produced ShoppinoBOT 3D model with Onshape full cloud 3D-modeling CAD software:

Source files