Assignment and Idea:
This week’s assignment was for the entire Harvard section. 20 of us had to work together to design a machine that included mechanism, actuation, automation, and application. Expectations were set that this was going to be a busy week, and it was!
We got started with some brainstorming:
… and I made a poll so we could vote anonymously on the direction that we were going:
Turns out that we did not really follow one of the paths that we voted on, but we landed on something that everyone felt good about: a “photo bleach” printer that would use computer vision to take a picture and control a sprayer on an X and Y rolling axis to “paint” an image onto a shirt. We broke down the tasks that were in place and I was on team X Y:
I spent most of my time over two days working on the roller mechanism and troubleshooting with the team. We ran into issues of belt width, tension, roller height, and rollers being level:
Eventually, we got the roller to be level:
After having to re-drill a corner support to remount and secure a roller tightly:
You can see the full detail of the core XY sub team’s work here:
https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.23/Harvard/machine/corexy/corexy.html
… and the full documentation and video for our whole team here:
https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.23/Harvard/machine/
Want a quick and exciting overview of all of it? We have a trailer!
I acknowledge the help and support of every student in The Harvard Section for their help in this week’s assignment, especially Michael and Dunya for their leadership of the project, and Will for his management of team Core XY. Lastly, ChatGPT 3.5, which helped me take text and images from the native OS X text editor I used to quickly document on my Mac into simple HTML for my git repo.
Updated May 22, 2024