Category: Ethan’s Status Reports

This week was once again a slower week in terms of personal progress due to being right after the design presentations. However, the feedback from the presentations was valuable. This motivated the work I did this week which included ordering of gantry parts, ideating a new, less expensive wheel based system for the gantry stand, and completing the Design Report.

Previously the team scrapped the wheels to due the cost for our original design being too high, but the new design uses a pre-fabed, low cost metal wagon that we are going to modify (more details in this weeks team report). Therefore, I will have to modify the CAD to account for the changes to the design once we get them finalized and approved by the teaching staff.

This sets me up to start 3D printing parts and assembling the gantry the week after break. Additionally, with the changes to the gantry stand, I may start ordering the stand parts and modifying the CAD if the feedback from the teaching staff about the change is positive.

This week was a slower week in terms of personal progress, due to a variety of factors. One such factor was that I was expecting feedback on our design presentation to incorporate into my structural design and design report, but I have not received feedback yet. As a result, this has caused some delay in my part ordering, structural design changes, and design report writing.

Despite those challenges I was able to start some work on two of the three tasks above. Firstly, I was able to put in some part orders for parts for the gantry. The gantry is an existing design (https://www.instructables.com/4xiDraw/) that we are going to attach to our uniquely designed stand. Therefore, the parts needed are very unlikely to change. Secondly, I was able to start work on the design report by working on the sections I have been in charge of thus far: the structure. This includes the implementation plan as well as the overall design. This work was minimal as I don’t want to get too far without feedback from the course staff after our presentation.

Looking forward to next week, I hope to get the material I ordered and start the assembly of the gantry. This includes planning out 3D printed parts and fully fleshing out the structure implementation plan which goes along with finishing the design report. This differs a little bit from our original task distribution which had me working more on the software side. However, as the project has progressed and I’ve done most of the work on the structure, I have been leading that portion and Andrew has been working more on the software.

This week I was mostly focused on making the computer aided design (CAD) for the structure of our gantry. We are using an existing gantry design (https://www.instructables.com/4xiDraw/), but we need to create our own structure design so that our gantry is portable and has the capability to raise and lower.

Shown below is the existing gantry.

 

From our original BOM from last week, I created the below preliminary model.

 

However, upon updating our BOM during the middle of the week with extra materials that we forgot, we realized that we were over budget and opted to remove the wheels from our original design for reasons outlined in the Team Status Report for 9/27. This led us to our current design shown below.

Looking forward to next week, I look to gain feedback on the structure design during our Design Presentation and incorporate it into the next and final version of the CAD model. Then when the CAD is finalized I look to order the parts and start 3D printing gantry parts and cutting the ordered parts to size.

I worked on presentation slides in the beginning of the week. I primarily focused on the slide format, images, diagrams, solution approach, and task distribution. I then formatted the rest of the team’s input to the presentation such that it matched the template and looked nice. Then since I was presenting, I proceeded to practice up until Wednesday’s presentation.

In the later half of the week I worked on the Bill of Materials (BOM) for the specifically for the gantry system (see below). Since we are going to be close to the budget, I tried to find components as cheap as possible. Dietrich is going to confirm that these parts will suffice.

I think this leaves me and the team in a good spot. Assuming we can finish the rest of the BOM according to schedule, I can start the CAD model (which I think will be pretty intense just looking at the BOM for the gantry). Hopefully, I will not need longer than the additional 9-10 days the schedule calls for.