Motion Module

I worked with Kelsey Tempel on this Motion Module Project. We wanted to produce a vertical motion by rotating one of the dowels. At first, we thought of creating a vertical object that sits on top of a tear-drop shaped piece which moves up and down as we rotate the off-centered circular piece. However, we came up with the idea of "hanging" something so that every time we rotate the circular piece, the hanging object can move up and down. We decided to make a square window on our two walls so that it is like a frame in which the hanging object appears and disappears as it moves up and down. My partner brought her cute little turtle accessory for the hanging object so it is like a peekaboo.

We decided to have four dowels; 2 for the bottom and the rest 2 for the tear-drop shaped piece and the rotating piece. Only the dowel for the rotating piece was to be 14cm in length for its handle while the others were to be 12cm in length. The holes in which the dowel was to go through had two types, a tight one and a lose one. The blue circles in the drawing above is a tight one for which the dowel should be fit too tight to rotate. For its tight fit, we decided to make the diameter of the hole to be 6.29mm since the diameter of the teflon rod was 6.3mm. The holes designed for the rotating piece and tear-drop shaped piece were lose holes, which are circled in green in the picture above. They are 6.5mm in diameter but we had to enlarge the holes because it was still too tight for the rod to rotate smoothly. Total of 4 stoppers were used at the ends of the two upper rods to hold them from moving left to right since the tear-drop piece had to be on the rotating piece. Two stoppers were used for hanging the creature for it to not slide off the rod.

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We then made our model using the form core and tested it out. From this model, we realized that the square window on the walls did not have to be so big. Therefore, we decided to shrink its height from 6cm to 4cm. Also, we discovered that the rotating piece(big circle) was too big that the tear-drop shaped piece sometimes went over to the other side and got the hanging creature all entangled up(drawing below demonstrates this). As a result, we ended up reforming our rotating piece into a weird looking shape that will still allow the tear-drop shaped piece to move stably.

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Now that our model was ready, we started our job on Solid Works. Since our two circular pieces were not circles, we had to estimate its shape when we tried to draw it on Solid Works. Here are some pictures.

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We then went ahead to print our model in the laser cutter with which we had some difficulties. Next time, we will have to double check whether or not all our pieces are extruded and saved on our thumb drive. We will also need to make sure that we know the exact thickness of the delrin piece before we put it in the laser cutter, because our piece did not cut through all the way. Anyways, we were able to get all the pieces out with some labor involved and get the model working just as we envisioned it to.

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Here is a video clip for our Motion Module.

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ITERATION

We had to make a simple iteration to our Motion Module Model because if was not strong enough to hold the upper dowels in place. We, therefore, added some more stoppers in and out of the upper dowels to keep it from moving sideways. Here are some pictures.



Here is a video of our improved Motion Module.

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