Week 11 - Machine Building

Machine Building #

This weeks assignment was to build a machine as a group. My hope for this week was to build a Strandbeest or a persistence of vision machine, but after a deliberation process, the architecture section decided on greated a gantry-operated Ouija board.

While I initially volunteered to be on the electronics team, there wasnt much to do towards the beginning of the project, and quite frankly, I didn’t have much to add. My contributions this week consisted of helping to think about the design of the cursor and printing and painting it. I was also able to apply my carpentry skills by helping with the assembling of the Ouija board table.

Reflecting on this week’s assignment, I would suggest that the structure should be changed such that folks (like myself) with little to no machine building experience can be grouped together to build a simple device, or to take one apart. The nature of the short time frame, and high aspirations, meant that contributions for this week’s assignment largely fell to those who has electronic or mechanical engineering skills. I don’t believe this should have been the case and I felt like it was a disservice to students who don’t have this skills but still want to learn machine building.

A Digital Ouija Board

Cursor Design and Creation: #

I was asked to design the cursor for this week and was thankfully joined by classmates who were better equipped in regards to their modeling skills. This process started by scanning the cursor, or planchette, that we were given. From here, the scanned image was uploaded to Illustrator and modified based on the the size of the board. A new outline was created and decals from the board design were added in order to decorate the cursor. Creating the 3d design proved to be more challenging and relied on understanding how the magnets of the end effector were situated.

Once the design was complete, I printed the cursor on a 3d printer, painted it black, and sanded it to achieve a spooky finish.

Woodworking: #

Although I didn’t design the Ouija board table, I helped with the assembly. Given that I wasn’t able to meanigfully contribute in other ways, I was grateful that I was able to apply my carpentry skills. The assembly process was interesting because I wasn’t aware of how the table was supposed to be assembled, the table wasn’t designed with any joints, the gantry and end effector hadn’t been finished, and I was told that we didn’t want to have any visible fasteners. This led to an assembly process that involved lots of glue and blocks.

To begin, we glued up the the four top pieces to the plate below it and added two screws to each edge. We then flipped this board, glued the side pieces and feet, and left the table upside down to set over night. The next day, we flipped the table, blocked the corners where the side pieces met the legs, and added brackets where the side pieces bet the top.

We went through a few iterations of how to suspend the gantry from or rest it within the table. At first we were going to create a platform, but we eventually settled on a shelf made of screwed in plywood pieces. We determined the depth of the shelf by simply holding the gantry in place marking where it should rest in order for end effector to be flush with the Ouija board. The last step was figuring out how to attach the front panel, which involved attaching blocks to the panel and table in order for it to be pressed in place.

Wokwi

The Final Product: #

Final

Notes and Resources

Class Notes: #

If i bump into problems with my final project, it might be worth adding an SD card for memory
how did the CBA group creating a webpage to modify their machine via BLE?