Motion Module

First off -- I have an AWESOME partner for this week's project. I missed last week's class because of being at Duke. So she had to come up with a design for the motion module on her own.

But because she is really great, we have a terrific design. She had already built a lego part version and a foam version of our design. The basic idea was the chomper! Very simple, but very cool.

Here are some photos of the drawings, lego model, and foam model that my partner did.

Here is the foam version of the chomper!

You can see easily how the lego version inspired the above design.

These are some drawings by my partner as she seperated the module into the different parts.

My contribution to the project started with detailing the exact measurements we were going to use for the parts. Here is my drawing of those measurements. We used these mesurements except for some changes rendered in solid works for the diameter of the wheel part and then the diameter of the holes for the teflon poles was actually .635 not .626 according to Lyn. 

Solid works is really fun if hard to use at first. So we started creating parts for each of the labeled three parts in our design. It was pretty easy. We had some issues at first with getting the dimensions to work for the circles for the holes for the teflon poles. But once we figured out how solid works liked us to do it, we got going pretty fast. Then we started messing around withe assembly function. At first we were kind of lost, then we guessed what the mate function was for. We figured out how concentric worked pretty well.

At this point Lyn came around with an example motion module he had built. He used bushings, two concentric circles to help hold things locked into place on the teflon poles. So we thought that might be a good thing to incorporate into our design. So we quickly built a part of that in solid works. Luckily after we had tried for about 20 minutes to get the assembly working, Robbie gave us a quick tutorial on the assembly program in solid works. He explained about coincident mating. Thank god for that! We were able to mate all of the parts and then have a 3D representation of our entire machine!

But the best part was yet to come :). We figured out how to use the simulation mode in solid works. It was pretty awesome. It showed us that our current design wouldn't work because the chomper arm of the motion module had the wrong dimensions with the current placement of the wheel. So we just made the chomper a bit thiner in width, and viola! The simulation worked perfectly! Go solid works.

So now all that is left to do, is to print our design on Friday.