Week 10: Machine Building and End Effectors

The biggest sidewalk plotter to end all plotters.

Machine Building Hardware Team

For our machine building probject, we split our group up into the software, the hardware, and the end effector teams. I was on the hardware team, which was in charge of building the body of the side walk plotter. While I now wish that we maybe should have come up with an interesting design, in the moment, we just replicated Nathan's already exisitng chassis, just magnified a couple times. We ended up building the body out of two 2 meter 30 width vslot bars, laser cut acrylic pieces, three stepper motors, laser cut acryclic geas, four wheels with bearings, and a laser cut gantry plate. Assembly was fun beacuse we were trying to figure out how to build the entire thing with minimal machine building knowledge. Here are some images of the process:

Main Takeaways

• bonding experience with class mates :)
• learned how to work with aluminum extrusions (tapping holes, the little inserts, etc)
• learned good practices for assembly
• helped prepare me for working with similar materials for my final project