At first, we did not have a ver clear idea about what to do, and a few ideas were pitched and talked over, among them the following:

• A Robotic Arm.
• A loom.
• A Cake Cutter.
• A contact 3d scanner.
• A cookie cutter.

Some sketches and ideas can be seen in the picture below: In the end, we opted for a cookie cutter machine.

The machine is designed to combine 4 axis of motion and use a patterned roller as and end effector, a href="http://archive.fabacademy.org/archives/2017/fablabutec/students/161">Alejandro and Guillermo designed the structure for the functioning of the machine

the cookie dough will be transported to the machine via an HDPE tray, and afterwards, the cutting roller will come down, supported by two motors and then, as the tray returns, it will make the roller turn, cutting the shapes needed for the Roller. A simulation of the machine working can be seen in the following image:

The first step was to design the effector -the cutting roller- Alejandro made the design in inventor and it we 3d printed it afterwards:

Next, we started cutting the gestalt node boxes in our laser cutter, for this, The 2015 Fab Lab ESAN cardboard design was used, however, the cutting was not to happen without incidents, some of our cardboard caught fire and part of the cutting work was not completely done because of the cardboard, which was bent on some areas.

And thus, we had the pieces set for the modules assembly:

Afterwards, based upon the design already made, we milled the HDPE tray in the shopbot, making a Pocket cut of 5mm at 14000 RPM using a single flute, upcut endmill.

Before we could start testing the modules, the Fabnet board had to be populated, so the RS-485 cable, the Pin Headers, and the resistors:

Next on queue was assembling the cardboard nodes, which has taken quite a while, we had to fasten it with our own bolts. We got the Gestalt nodes just on tuesday April 18th morning, so it has been an uphill battle to make the machine as far as we have managed to get. Alexandra was in charge of the modules assembly

Then, the stages needed to be tested, in order to do so, the singe_node.py was used:

A few hours later, we got the second stage done and started testing coordinated motion, in order to do so, we used the xy_plotter.py file.

It was noticed that, by the rationale of the machine, if we wanted to get both axis to move in sync, the coordinates given in the python file needed to have opposite signs.

The First Experiments proved succesful, but the cardboard structure was not robust enough for the planned use, so we designed and cut a new structure in 3mm acryllic:

The files can be found here