Week 9 - Mechanical Design

Week 9 goal :
Group assignment :
- design a machine (mechanism+automation), including the end effector
- build the passive parts and operate it manually
- document the group project and your individual contribution
Hardware and softwares used for this assignment :
Hardware :
  - Laser cutter
Softwares :
  - Rhino and grasshopper.
  - Fusion 360.
  - Trello, a team management software.
Learning outcomes :

This week was not an easy week. The most difficult part being to organize the work among the team. Different team members have different expectations, different ways of working and most of all really busy parallel professional lives. This critical situation forced us to reflect and rethink the way we all work together. I personally learned a lot about the limit of what is possible and what is not while managing the views of all the different members of the team. In summary, I've learned pragmatism in team management.

Preamble

As I was in charge of the documentation, I concentrated my efforts on the group project documentation that you can find here below :
Link to the group project page
I will explain my individual contribution here below.

Documentation

As I was in charge of the documentation, I quickly started documenting everything we were doing as a group on the group project page

Brainstorming

We organized a first meeting at the end of which we decided to make a origami making machine. I organized the tasks among the team members. That was really tricky as everybody was really busy. So we had to find a way to have a quick start and push the project forward.

Adjusting the team member workflows

Pushing the team and the project rather quickly at the beginning, let appear some friction in the team. As everything didn't go as smoothly as it was planned (of course!) and everybody as a different style of working. We thus had to find a way to work together. I organized a meeting with all the team and we discussed about how to better organize the team which result can be find on the group page.

Building the cardboard linear stages

As we decided to work in small teams, I continued to build with Victor the cardboard linear stages with the cardboard with the right thickness (3mm). Michele came to help the team also. It seemed to wrok pretty well but there was a lot of problems with them that we discussed on the group page

Cutting

Assembling

The kit was quite easy to assemble.

Our linear stages

Here are the linear stages.

Here is a movie of the moving linear stage (with Victor's hand).

We have discussed the good and bad of these linear stages on the group page

Switching project to a drawing machine

Continuing the discussion we had during the day about what machine can we make from now, Victor and David proposed to go for a drawing machine.

I liked the idea of a drawing machine that we can use anywhere. I also liked that the project was a good fit for our working team style. It is simple enough so we could chunk the project in smaller projects and even allow as much improvements as we want. Also I really appreciate that this project can be made from scratch and that we can understand every piece and code of our machine.

Organizing the tasks

The first task I would work on is chunking the project in tasks that everybody (or small teams) could take. Each task would have a leader that would be responsible of each part of the project.

I have set up labels corresponding to different priorities and illustrating the status of each task.