For this week's HTMaA assignment we were tasked with working together in a group to build a machine that does something. The afternoon session on Thursday 12/8 ended up having only 4 group members including me. Since we didn't have a big team it was important that we all worked concurrently on different tasks to make sure we completed on time.
Our team consisted of:
Yi-Tung Shen
Cody Glen
Stefania Druga
Kreg Hanning
I started by milling the USB -> fab board. The modela has been cutting too deep lately since the sacrificial layer is no longer adhering to the bed properly. To compensate, I made sure to press down the sacrificial layer using the rubber roller in the CBA shop and adjusted the cut depth the .02.
Once the board was milled and the PSU was spliced to work with the pin headers, I jumped over to help out with building some of the linear actuators. Each of the assemblies came together pretty easily. One of the linear actuators was assembled without any glue and I noticed that this could create a problem later on, so I disassembled and reassembled it, this time using a generous supply of glue.
After we had all of the linear actuators built and the boards stuffed it was time to start thinking about the software. Stefania Druga took the lead on the software since she will be using the machine in her final project.
Our goal was to create a simple hot wire cutting machine for the purpose of cutting sheets of foam. The foam would be positioned up on it's side and the machine would cut along the Z and Y axis to cut out 2D profiles.
We planned on using the Fab modules as the interface for controlling the machine. The simple example provided by Nadya was a great start, but it also calculated a jump step which we would not need in our machine. Stefania and I worked together to modify the module to ignore the jump step and instead generate an array of coordinates along a 2D plane.
Due to time constraints, this is where my contribution to the machine ended. I would have liked to see the machine through to completion, however, I needed to put my main focus on completing my final project.