FabAcademy - 2017

The first ideas:

• A machine to squeeze oranges for juice.
• A machine to water plants.
• A Braille printer.
• A robotic camera arm.

We decided on the plant watering machine.

It must have a moveable head that runs on the x and y axes to position a hose over each plant and water it.

The plants will be arranged in a grid of 3x3. under the machine head.

Movement on the z axis is not absolutely necessary, so we will discuss wether to add it or not during th process.

Other possibilities:

• Movement buttons for manual watering.
• Preset watering patterns for some common plants and herbs.
• Move the hose up and down for watering.
• A robotic camera arm.

At the lab we were offered an old broken 3d printer to salvage parts and reuse them in our machine. Salvaged parts include: stepper motors, metal bars, bearings, electronic components, and others.

For the first part of the project, I was in charge of dissasembling the old 3d printer.

Alberto Raygada made a (list of components) with some links to technical data.

These are the main parts salvaged:

I was also in charge of designing a system of rack and pinion for the machine.

I designed it using openSCAD.

For the actual rack and pinion I used (racatack's openScad file), wich I adapted to our project.

The first idea of a rack and pinion did not work well. The system was not moving parallel to the axis, so it got stuck easily.

So we decided to change the system to a screw, to convert rotation to linear movement. The MDF box has a nut attached to it, so when the screw is rotated by the stepper motor, the box moves in one direction along the screw. Another such system is mounted on the box, so there is another movement along the other axis, perpendicular to the first one.

The box for this system was made using makercase.com, OpenScad and Inkscape.