Arm CAD

In this Sprint, we focussed on mostly improving the work from the last sprint. We printed the gears with added shaft length, to fix the problem with the motors, and added a castor wheel to the arm so there was less friction from the “elbow”. However, once we integrated with the software system, we started running into problems. The main issue was that our current system had too much backlash, and the motors were struggling with making straight lines, and even moving the system at all. We started considering a couple causes and solutions. The joints on the arm were a little wobbly, and not very constrained, which contributed some to the problem. But the main issue was with the gears. We went back and forth on how to fix the system, but eventually decided that there would be no good way to make the gears move smoothly enough to power the arm with the precision we wanted.

Designing Table and Character

For this sprint, our goal was to give Andrew an adorable personality, which is why we stuck to the original idea of a robot face. We also decided to paint him to emphasize this idea. We used pastel primary colors for the main face because pastel colors are usually correlated with childhood and pastel colors because when combined they make multiple colors. The idea of multiple colors together is a symbol of how we as a group had various inputs and came together to make an amazing mechanism.

Sprint Two and Sprint Three have the same electrical set up. On the left you can see the schematic for the mechanism.

If you would like to learn more about the set-up you can click here to learn more.