This week I was able to begin construction of our gantry. This included finalizing all of our 3D printed parts and the construction of the frame. A majority of our parts have been printed, and those that are not are to be printed once the makerspace has a printer available. The construction of the frame is completed, and we now have the outline of ourgantry standing on four legs. Due to an ordering mistake on my end, we did not have enough screws to attach all of the bearing mounts to the legs, so not all axes are in place yet, however two have been added and are functioning well. I have also been able to test the method of attaching the motor belts to the carriages and this has been successful. A modification to the orientation of how the carriages are printed resulted in a much more sturdy version, as the previous versions had worked but the tabs for connecting broke off easily.
I was not able to fully complete the gantry construction this week due to an ordering mistake and this has put me slightly behind schedule. This will be very easy to rectify, however, as the parts needed should arrive next week and allow me to quickly finish up the gantry. A possible issue which I have noticed once having the axes in place is that the rods in the bearing mounts have very little extra space, and it is possible that they actually slip out of the mounts. This hopefully will not be a problem in operation, as the gantry will not be moving around, but we may have to glue the rods inside the bearings to secure them in place. This would be an easy modification to do but does make it more difficult to make modifications to the gantry in the future.
In the following week I will complete full assembly of the gantry, including all axes, carriages, and the print head. In addition to this I will help Eric and Harsh in whatever remains to be completed in order to have a demo ready. Currently I foresee this as being assisting Eric in creating and testing the control routines for brush movement and contact, or assisting Harsh in developing the algorithm and a test suite for it.