HTMAA 25
home about me final projectThis week’s project was to work as a section to create a machine. As this was mainly a group project, it might be useful to reference the full documentation for the machine we built here.
The core idea is a Dalek that, instead of exterminating your physical being, exterminates your brain by forcing you to consume internet brainrot. This mostly came about because we had people who:
I most strongly associated with the third group of people, so my individual contributions for this week are mostly focused on building out the Dalek form.
My first contribution was to create a spacefill CAD file for everyone to reference off of. The primary idea was that once the dimensions were in, everyone could base their interfaces off of the dimensions and no system would stall another just based off of CAD. The secondary idea was that everyone could CAD in-place on files that would be included in the assembly, so that we would have the final Dalek fully assembled in CAD as well as real life.
While this file was pretty successful for the first purpose, it was somewhat less so for the second. Ah well.
This was CAD to respect the original Dalek dimensions as much as possible, while keeping a total height of ~80cm and allowing a generous amount of space for a phone. I extruded actual models in CAD to qualitatively confirm these, as shown here:
We then split into our individual teams. As part of the external team, my main responsibility was to create the arms section, which you can see in CAD below:
This was to be lasercut out of cardboard. The curved section was cut by:
The entire arms section was cut once at half size first to double-check lasercutter settings as well as confirm with other people that the shape/designed seemed reasonable. The finalized settings I used were:
| Cut type | Power | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Full cut | 100% | 16% |
| Half cut | 100% | 70% |
And the file is here (check out that perfect nesting!).
Unfortunately, whatever measurement I got off the calipers for cardboard thickness was a little too wide (4mm), and so my joints were super loose. On assembly, this structure was mostly held together with hot glue.
I also helped CAD and lasercut the cardboard grating on the section around the section where the phone sits (files here and here - I didn’t want to manually nest these so these were done by the arrange tool in Fusion’s CAM mode!), where I set the slot thickness to be a little thinner (3.5mm) for a successful press fit. I also bandsaw-cut the black ABS plastic to fill in the gaps in the grating for a more complete look.
I also assisted other people in the Externals team in:
Much of the structure ended up held together by either hot glue or gravity, which I suppose is a consequence of:
There were also some components we as a team discussed having, but did not have enough time to actualize, e.g.
It was super cool to work with more people for a week, and see a larger project come to life! There was definitely a lot of time pressure though, which both a positive (forced us to make decisions and move quickly) and a negative (lots of parts super rushed, lots of good practices skipped over for the sake of getting things done). I feel like I personally should have stepped outside of my comfort zone a little more and tried to help out with CV or controls in the other teams, but then again my relative strengths lay in rapid CAD and fabrication, and I think was able to help a lot with those aspects.