Schedule

The newly updated schedule can be seen in our weekly team meeting. From this updated Gantt chart, this week’s focus is scoping and learning about Fusion 360 and seeing if it can work.

Progress This Week

This week, I was able to accomplish what our Gantt chart set out. I set up Fusion 360 and tried to follow a few tutorials. I realized that creating each component from scratch was going to be very time consuming and quite difficult. However, there was a possibility around this for some parts — McMaster-Carr. In Fusion 360, there is an insert McMaster-Carr component feature that uses a vendor’s parts as CAD files we can import. From this, I was able to create the rack and pinion components pretty easily. However, the second part of this, the animation portion, I realized is more complicated because the software doesn’t detect collision, so some motions have to be made separately, non-intuitively. Overall, Maxine and I were able to scope our our limits, some different options.

We also thought about potentially making a robotics arm instead of building our own gantry, since there is more support online. But after talking to the staff, we contemplated the tradeoffs between parts with more online support versus more complex path planning. We decided to keep to our original plan

Next Week’s To-do

Next week, I will be focusing on the Z axis movement. Predominately the rack and pinion structure, and hopefully the gripper.