Final Project
Final Project IDEAS
Well The Idea Was To Make a Segment Display or something that explores physical change in state to display.
1st Ideas was to make each pixel as liquid box as shown below.
The Issue with this project was that it was too complex to achieve and cost was too high to make evan a single segment.
Well The idea was to Make a segment display and put mirror over it and project the reflection on a surface
Well The idea was to Make a segment display and put mirror over it and project the reflection on a surface. The above image is of by just pasting the mirrors on a plane surface to understand what are we trying to achieve.
The Most Time Critical Task for this project Was to Design The Segment out of Completely digital fabricated Material.
Have Documented The CAD designing Process As in the Week 2
So, I prepared the below drawing for laser cutting. I used 3mm MDF board for these components.
Problem :
When I imported the above file in Laser machine software, the lines appeared to be curved as shown below
Solution:
I realized that I needed to export the dxf files in "Lines and arcs" format.
This solved my problem immediately and then I used the dxf file with following settings to prepare my first lazer cut component.
I used 2 different colours within Rhino. 1 layer was for letter, which needed to be etched and another layer had all the lines that needed to be cut.
Here are some videos showing the laser cutting process.
SIL Laser Machine 2 Viraj from Viraj Gandhi on Vimeo.
SIL Laser Machine \ Viraj from Viraj Gandhi on Vimeo.
So, intially I considered designing central element "G" with axis along shorter width, unlike the rest of them. This was to avoid collision with neighbouring elements. But later I realized that it did not help much and the rotation was very limited, hence I made them all same.
This is how my one element looked like.
I tried putting these elements together and checked the minimum distance required to avoid collision. Once the distance was determined, I was sure only to use all the elements with the same axis of rotation as stated above.
I tried putting these elements together and checked the minimum distance required to avoid collision. Once the distance was determined, I was sure only to use all the elements with the same axis of rotation as stated above.
In total 1 segment contains 7 elements. And the whole clock contains 4 such segments.
Here are some photos showing the assembly process
CNC-FINAL2 from Viraj Gandhi on Vimeo.
Attached is the File for Base of to be Cut at CNC
So I downloaded Satshakit board for reference. I added output for 7 servo motors, 4 I2C output with a voltage regulator and removed extra pins that I was not using.
Following is the video showing milling process.
This is the first board I made for my final project.
My plan was to make 4 such boards and connect them via I2C protocol.
However, I was not able to burn the bootloader. I tried hard but could not find the error.
I Have made following Changes.
1) now only one I2c Pair is provided as we will anyhow daisy chain the components.
2) added GND and VCC for Servo considering I can still try to use it as planned before if the I2C network Fails
3) Removed the Voltage Regulator as we need 5V both for servo and IC.
As we can see the pins are not isolated.
After solving this error, the board started working.
I have used the same board for my Networking assignment.
We connect out Segments as seen In above Diagram.
Each segment has a Address in I2C network.
We have to solder pads on I2C Driver to select right Address.
Right now we are testing the board with a arduino nano and PCA9685 board.
Following is the code which shows the addressing to the board.
Attached is the Code That Is Show above.
This is the Master code that runs the clock
Not it used the RTCLib.h for the Clock module
and Atafruit_prmServoDriver library for the PCA9685 Driver.
Below are the Picture of Programming the 328P Board with same code.