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Week 10 - outputs

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hero
liquid crystal elastomer gripper (flower?)
ye olde LEDs

hero >

liquid crystal elastomer gripper (flower?) >

with Ozgun and Lucy’s help, I made an artificial muscle gripper. there was a bit of trial and error and I got most of the way to a functional prototype (the gripper does actuate with heat! but the heating mechanism I ended up integrataing isn’t working very well):

pla prototypes of different actuation mechanisms
going back to the drawing board after learning fdm pla is generally too rigid for this stuff
laser cut some transparency film (probably petg?) into a claw shape
learned that transparency film was not temperature resistant
tried laser cutting polyimide (very hard apparently)
learned that I laser cut the wrong kind of polyimide (had a backer, very thin)
tried laser cutting thicker polyimide
used an exacto knife instead
re-learned that adhesion is hard; roughening necessary to get that
instead vinyl cut mesh
print on mesh was a success
used some resistive felt from adafruit (20ohms/cm^2) for heating element
ran into issues interconnecting using copper tape
milled a pcb as a breakout for a 6-pin header
still ran into issues with interconnects

ye olde LEDs >

I made this star trek combadge and COB led driver board awhile back during ecad/efab week:

Week 10 - outputs

Contents

hero >

liquid crystal elastomer gripper (flower?) >

ye olde LEDs >