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ME 360

This was the semester-long projects for ME 360

Team Members

Gasket Project

The first project is an exercise in measuring and tolerances. We measured the dimensions of a given plate and needed to design a gasket to match the given plate perfectly. I measured and machined the gasket.



I don't have a photo of the final products, because I did not take photos until the end in which I got hurt.


 


CNC Router

This project was to make a CNC router that can cut plastic styrofoam.



Motion System

In order to have the most power in moving the motion system we used the core-xy system that uses 2 motors together to move the carriage. This allows for move force to be applied that the typical to cut the material. It also used bearing to move around instead of sliders as this allows us to reduce friction.


Design

The cnc router was designed to be as space efficient as possible as we needed to have the required amount of movement along as being as rigid as possible. The given spindle was 3 inches in diameter. Adding the spindle carriage the tool head and the linear rails, the original 10 inches of free space became 5.5 inches of available travel.


Firmware

When programing the controller board, I used VSCode and compiled my own version of Marlin. The software I programmed allowed me to use custom commands, such as setting up work coordinates, and switching between absolute and work coordinates.


The video gives you a brief overview on the electronics works.




 

Inverted Pendulum


Concept

The inverted pendulum is based on the idea of balancing a stick vertically. In the world, the project is constrained to the A and B rotational axis.


Design

In making an inverted pendulum, we constrain the project to an A axis which would be the pivot point of the pendulum. Then we would have an encoder pendulum to allow it to know the position of the pendulum.

Computation

Due to Fusion 360 not having the capability to run a simulation based on a closed loop system, I created did the computational load in MatLab and plotted the data. I used the Caltech resources to determine the first movements to get the pendulum vertical. I also used the Matlab Simulation tutorial which helped me create the animation.



Firmware

I never was able to test the firmware, but I was able to create In order to have enough computational power, I have the arduino gather angle of the pendulum and stepper motor. It will also communicate with my laptop via usb port. Thus I can run the heavy computational loads on the computer.




Simulation


When creating the animation, it is important to note the limitations of fusion 360. It does not have belt animations, which does not allow me to animate the system as if the belt is pulling the carriage. The second thing is that the motion study does not account for accelerations and does not interact with other joins which would be required for the inverted pendulum. So in order to create the animation I plotted the points as a function of displacement, and was able to determine make a reasonable simulation.


Note the first rendered simulation did not render properly as the animation feature did not want to render quick movement properly. The motion study did do a proper animation of the system.


Rendered Animation

Motion Study



 


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