Author: johnliu

At the beginning of the week, we have made a substantial design change which is that instead of individual mechanical sweepers, we will instead simply have a single sorter at the end of our conveyor belt that will guide fallen objects into their designated categories.

This week, we made a lot of progress in the mechanical aspects by detailing the design in Solidworks. This solidifies a lot of our ideas on how we will mechanically design our system and gives us a concrete estimate to a lot of the expected materials we will need. We have also designed a lot of the custom parts that we will need manufacture in our project. For this next week, I will quickly need to finish the remaining design and begin ordering parts for manufacturing and assembling.

Personal Accomplishments:

I installed Solidworks and researched typical conveyor belt designs. I have begun drafts of the mechanical designs on Solidworks. I communicated with my group a potential design change to change the form factor of our servo actuators to come in from the side and guide the material into its proper bin instead of directly knocking it. However this may come at the cost of speed.

Schedule:

We are currently on track for the mechanical design as I finish up the draft within this next week.

Deliverables:

As I continue designing, the group and I will eventually figure out which (mechanical sweeper) design will fit our requirements the best. I will also need to finish our first drafts and begin prototyping components. We will also need to finish our list of needed materials which is largely reliant on the designs of our mechanical components.