Link to the class website for this week.

This week was machen week in HTMAA. I had a lot of time this past summer on my cross country bike tour to dream up projects that I want to work on. One such project was what I called the Shot Bot. The Shot Bot is a device about the same size as a coffee maker with shot glasses on a turntable. Peristaltic pumps would fill up each shot glass with a random liquid between water and vodka. This would make for an interesting game at a party!

When we were brainstorming in the EECS group for the project of the week, I brought up the Shot Bot. To my surprise the idea of a drink making robot with a circular turntable was rather popular. Because we felt that the Shot Bot would be too small, we upgraded to the Barduino.

I then hopped into Onshape and started Cading. I joined the turntable team who was responsible for this main mechanical motion. However, before we could even design how the turntable worked we needed to design the machine frame! We were provided a lot of 2020 extruded aluminum, so I opted to use that wherever possible. I came up with this design that you can check out here.

The turn table would be populated with solo cups like so:

Fan came up with a very elegant way to drive the turntable with a pinion gear on a stepper motor using laser cut acrylic gears.

Now it was time to start manufacturing! Anthony helped us cut the turntable out of some nice plywood on the CNC router in EDS.

I then applied a coat of bee’s wax to it to finish the wood and make it water resistant. Fan cut out the turntable mechanism and placed a pin roller bearing on top for the table to rotate on.

We were all very happy when the table rotated!

The rest of the machine building was hectic and procrastinated until the last minute. I feel like this image captures my experience quite well. Keep in mind that this was taken around 11:00 pm the night before the machine was due!

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