Sprint 1: Making our Prototype
We used this sprint to choose our idea and plan our design and presented it on October 28th.
Planning was difficult because we planned individual components without thinking about how they would interact during integration. We CADed a frame that we made out of hardboard and hot glue as well as a set of boxes with holes that could be placed atop the frame to hold up rods. The boxes were made with cardboard. One rod was scavenged and the other replaced with nylon rope. For example, the mechanical team figured putting a rope in place of a second rod would function well enough without considering how the cardboard centerpiece that would later hold the dispenser would move along it. If you watch our video below, you will notice how the hopper moves spasmodically across the shaft. This happens because the cardboard centerpiece is catching on the loose nylon rope. We also faced troubles with the belt, which wasn’t tensioning properly, and which had a tendency to try to hop off the gear — a problem we tried to remedy with a small, circular piece of poster board that we attached to the outside of the gear. We also only managed to partially print the dispenser we wanted, so rather than being a funnel shape with a tube and spinning agitator attached, it was a cylinder with a small lip and a hole in it. While we struggled with these aspects of our design, we still managed to make a semi-functional one-axis gantry with some semblance of a dispenser for the sprint review presentation.
We focused on making a gantry, running stepper motors, and simplifying images for our first sprint. Building and designing our first-sprint gantry proved to be a difficult feat in itself. Props to Justin Kunimune and Liv Kelley! The whole team owes you for your hard work with the gantry.
The software and electrical team had to detect a picture’s contours and figure out how the stepper motors also worked. Ariana got code to move our stepper motors working while Lydia created code for images processing that allowed us to identify contours and features of an image. Because this project depends on image processing and motor movement, their work helps the team pass a software hurdle. Their hard work definitely paid off for the entire team!
We resolved to focus on our dispenser for our next sprint because we realized that we don’t even have a semi-functional version of the dispenser at this point. Ideally, our dispenser will be a hopper that will move smoothly and release sprinkles consistently with the help of a stirring component that moves along its base. Once we get the this working, the mechanical team plans to tweak the gantry design to meet the dispenser’s needs. The software team plans to work on the integration challenge mentioned before: using digital images to determine the stepper motor’s position. The hope is that by the end of our time working on this project, we will have met the MVP goal, which involves a 2-axis gantry which will process and print edible black and white pictures. We also hope to create something with submilimeter precision, user friendliness (think touch screen), clean aesthetic, and a theme song. We’re not sure how many of these we will meet, but we think that with hard work we’ll at least be able to make the system pretty and precise. I guess we’ll see in the coming sprints!
Be sure to follow our Sprinkle Machine publication in Medium for more updates!
