Mechanical design,Machine Design

GROUP PAGE FOR MACHINE DESIGN

On this project I mainly focused on the mechanical design aspects, with the help and tips of my project mates. Together with Serge we made a summary of our work, taken from the group page. First thing that I did was to build a rough 3D model in Solidworks, as shown in the pictures below. Starting from there, we prototyped a physical model with the ShopBot in order to get a feeling for the size and the structural strenght of the model.

We Printed pulleys in the 3d printer using PLA filaments

We used Servo motors for lifting and bringing down the pen while sketching

We also included the stepper motor for moving the bed horizontally and also the penholder vertically

The electronics and programming of this machine was made by lambert RULINDANA

Technical analysis

We started building the external body of the machine by using cardbords in the structure of the machine and it appeared very weak to the extent it caused some failures due to weight applied on the structure and we hard to re-do the study of material to use, the cardboard had a thicknes of 3mm and we went for an mdf of 18mm, this proved strong and supportive so we had to change the design and merged with the one which is appropriate.

For motion and mechanisms we first thought of using gears to lift or release the bed or driving it in the xy plane but it seems more hectic due to the fact that we wanted to print them from the 3d printer and it seemed to cause some friction and wearing out of the gears so we decided to print pulleys and used a mechanism of pulleys and belt.We printed the pulleys in the 3d printers and shipped in the belts(this belts are known as: Classical Timing Belts)

We are hoping to improve the Machine in a way where by it can be a multi-purpose machine, whereby we are thinking of a way where it will be doing different things like, drilling,sketching and also printing

Wooden front bar made in mdf

After it was designed in solidworks we printed it using shopbot

I designed this pen holder in solidworks and had to 3d print it

Here on this cylindrical bars we used aluminium bars that we had in fablab

Joning different parts of the machine

Final design of our Machine

We cutted the parts with shopbot before assembling it

Working together as we assembled the parts

Here is our 3D-Plotter Machine

Here is our 3D-Plotter Machine

DFX and STL files for Machine Design