This week was very interesting, even though much of time i was left a little clueless about the processes involved in making each of the part of the apple lathe machine. I however, was able to put a lot of work into documentation and 3d printing.
The brain storming meetings were a lot of fun. It was the place to ask all the silly questions, the whys and hows. The CBA people had a lot of patience in answering these questions. They took the lead since they are the most well versed in the ways to use the many machines and shop equipment.
We decided from the beginning that the machine making quest would have to involve food. We walked around the shop and got an introduction to how all the machines worked. That was very, very good.
photosOnce we decided on the apple peeler (inspired by this) , everyone was divided into groups. I was placed with the hardware and the documentation group.
One of the good things about being with documentation was that every part of the apple peeler making process needed to accounted for. That meant keeping in touch with other groups, following up on their progress, requesting documentation, or watching different people making differnet parts of the machine.
designing: alfonso did a super design. A few of us were handed off parts to print on the Sindoh and Prusa.
the bigger parts were not all that easy. There was something wrong with the computer connected to the Sindoh and we ended up spending a lot of tiem trying to fix it. Finally it worked! The Prusa's problems were fixed when we changed the fill to a 100% lots of printing images.
Eyal and Joao worked with the software and patiently explained to us its workings. Here are the shapes they were able to create. The following three are Eyal's photos.
Many more group meetings later, we decided to use Git to track our progress, and to communicate with eachother (especially since preparartions for other class' finals were also taking place simultaneously). We also had to create a dropbox folder since not everyone had the time to alter imge and video compression before upload. The documentation team was more than happy to take care of that.
I was busy attempting to compile an in-the-process video with the rest of us at ACT. What was meant to be a simple two min video turned out to bbe a fairly elaborate, synchronised, carefully edited 5 min video (we even recorded Eyal and Brian pretend to be the apple peeler machine so that we'd haev varied sound effects).
as the week was getting over, the machine was coming together beautifully.
I got to learn a lot about machine design, thinking thru the process of making something like this, software, interfaces and git.
here is the documentation video