#week 9
mechanical design

This weeks assignment

MECHANICAL DESIGN (week 1 of 2)
Make a machine, including the end effector, build the passive parts and operate it manually.



Designing the Flipper/pingpong game

This week was a group assignment - that you can read more about here. Since we were only two people in that group - with very oposite backgrounds- made the dividing of the tasks quite simple. Jakob would fokus on building the "shooter" and the mekanism - and I would fokus on the frame and fabricating the rest of the concept/structure. Since Fusion360 is my big nemesis, I insisted on using it for designing the frame. Which ended in me spending several days in just learning Fusion and trying to find my way around. 

The frame of the game will be standing in a large window towards the street outside the lab - for people passing by to watch and try themselves.

Game concept

We started off with a brainstorming about the game concept, where I started off with a conceptual sketch in Inkscape. I suggested that we could make a floor large scale ping-pong game that could be displayed in the window in the Lab, towards the street.

This week was before easter and we thought it could be an easter theme by "shooting eggs". 

Fusion

After landing the concept, I then continued to modell the frame in Fusion360. As you can see from the design, this is still not "my program" - but I did managed to get the frame done and setting the millingpaths in CAM module.

Milling the frame

I then went onto milling the frame in 12mm OSB, where I used a 6mm flat upcut for the contour, and a 3mm flat upcut for the pockets where the "ballpoints" would go.

Lasercutting the slope

The slope and the ball points were designed in illustrator and lasercut in double layered cardboard and 4mill plywood.

Mounting the shooter

The final job was to fit in Jakobs "shooter" - that kind of grew on the way to the final design. So we had to make some changes to the frame, and make the vertical "ramp" where it would be mounted a bit longer so it could fully rotate.

Even though the group members were working on different elements of the game, we managed to do some rounds of testing with the shooter - and work out som better ways to design it togheter. The development of the shooter prototype looked is shown under. We also made some changes to the frame - adding some space under the slope - for the vertical axis to fit under. And also some minor changes for the mounting of the shooter. One thing we forgot to have in mind, was that the final size of the shooter did not fit with the rest of the frame - so this made for adjustments to fit it in properly.

The project on my part was strongly affected that I kept getting "interrupted" by people dropping in the door either wanting to say hi, ask questions or getting a tour of the lab - which is great - but it made it really difficult to follow Jakobs process and getting all the details.