After settling back in Hong Kong with my 14 day quarantine, I had some time to do a more in-depth exploration of Fusion360. I followed several tutorials and started to get the hang of Fusion360’s fundamentals. Claire and I had a discussion whether we should switch to simulating a robotic arm instead of the gantry approach for a few reasons.

The gantry approach was what we were going to do in implementation before the virus hit. We were familiar with the setup but, it required integration of many small components. We were not confident in our CAD abilities to integrate these components well together.

On the other hand, there were a lot more resources online about building robotic arms. We could pick one that fit our needs and follow it closely, minimizing the risk of our simulation not fully integrating. However, the path planning mathematics would be significantly more challenging.

I took some time rebuilding our gantry approach and see how much of a challenge that could pose. To my pleasant surprise, there was a feature on Fusion360 which allowed us to directly import 3D models of parts from McMaster-Carr. I started off simulating the X portion of our gantry.

For now, we have decided on continuing with simulating our gantry. We believe even though it would be more difficult to integrate separate components, we would save a lot of time on the path planning math since we would only have to deal with simple stepper motors.

Being more familiar now with Fusion360, we have updated our Gantt chart (seen on our team status update). For this week, I am on track with learning the basics of the software. Next week, I plan to continuing working on the XY gantry and integrating the timing belt and stepper motors.