I had a very productive week. We have received all parts and gears printed for the dispenser as well as the bottom chassis. We were able to test both of their functionalities. I assembled them while David wrote the drivers for each part. We were able to test and verify that the bottom chassis can rotate 90 degrees at a time, as well as the dispenser is able to dispense one card at a time fairly consistently.
For the bottom chassis, I was making holes on the board using a laser cutter, but I had to go through multiple trials due to the machine’s calibration being slightly off. When we print further prototypes or the final one, we will make the holes while printing other things as well, so this is not too big of a problem.
For the dispenser, we still have the gears for the servo motor that is in progress, but we manually rolled out a card and used the DC motor to shoot the card out further. It does get stuck here and there, but with more weight or force on top of the cards, we might be able to achieve our requirement pretty soon.
This puts me very ahead of the schedule. The only thing I would have to do is to make a couple more prototypes, verify that those work, and get some extensive testing on the dispensing and rotation of the chassis.
My goal for next week is to start re-cutting a chassis that is closer to what we would use for the final design since we have made some changes in the design to cut weights and get rid of unnecessary parts of the chassis. For the dispenser, we will likely just use the current design and only print a new one if necessary. With these, if we have a barebone event loop, I would like to test the dispensing on top of the chassis as a stretch goal.
