machine building

we had to make a machine in a week. We decided to make a lathe that's specialized for peeling apples. all of the documentation for machine can be found here.

I was most interested in understanding how the toolpath from the UI will translate into instructions for the stepper motors. this put me right at border of the embedded electronics and UI group.

all of the electronics progress is documented here.

most noteable contributions

programming stepper boards

I set up our stepper motors in squidworks and calibrated their direction and distance per step to match real distance measurements on the machine to those defined in the UI



That is a reloadable cuttlefish program to run the machine

debugging saturn

we kept running into issues when trying to generate a continuous toolpath for the apple carving. all the motors would be running smoothly until it had to turn one corner and start moving back accross the apple. Since jake had never used this setup for a rotary axis before, we kept assuming it was due to large values in Z since our cheat for the rotary axis was to just send increasingly large values for z so the path looks like a helix in cylindrical coordiantes.

it took me about a full night to peice apart saturn, the javascript "hunk" which controls the coordination across different motion axes. I finally found the bug and fixed it in our forked iLathe repo.