Category: Sam’s Status Reports

This week has been spent working to refine the chip system. Some pieces of the system that see heavy use or many chips hitting it have been reprinted with higher infill to make them more robust. The conveyor belt motor had to be replaced as well because testing showed the previous motor was moving too quickly for the rest of the system. I have also spent time integrating the system into the main controller to make sure the proper number of chips are counted and sent back.

Schedule is on time or a small amount behind, as final demos are approaching this week. I will be putting more hours into this project for this final week than normal as classes have ended and the final demos are coming up, so I can catch up.

I hope to complete the entire chip system and integrate for the final demo

This week I repaired the axle of the chip collection system with a better design less prone to shearing off at the motor coupling and better at holding the conveyor in place. Additionally I made a new motor mount so that the motor is attached more robustly.

I also connected the color sensing into the chip hopper and conveyor belt to complete integrating those systems so they are running smoothly. Having more pieces integrated also means we can move forward on integrating with other systems in this project.

I think I am on schedule, but with final demos approaching I am hoping to get to final integration as soon as possible so any debugging can be worked on this week.

I hope to complete the chip collection and return, fully integrated and mostly integrated with my other group members portions of the project.

I had to spend a lot of time learning how to use Autodesk Fusion. My portion of the project required significant fabrication as I am making something that does not exist, so nearly every part of it is 3d printed so I have something to hold my circuit and allow the circuit to control the flow of chips mechanically. I learned this through watching lectures online about how to 3d model, and had some mechanical engineers I know at CMU walk me through the basics.

This week was mostly spent on the interim demo. I got the conveyor belt and the hopper working together, with the color sensing working on its own. A problem I did face this week was an axle snapping on the conveyor belt, which made it so I could not run the conveyor belt during the demo. I am fixing this problem by creating more durable axles that fit the conveyor belt better so they are under less strain. This week I hope to integrate color sensing into the rest and fix the axles on the current system.

This week I worked a lot on making finalize subsystems of the chip sorter. The two major accomplishments are full 3d printed and assembled chip hopper and and working color sensing. Both components are functional and are able to sort chips by color. Current work is focused on building the conveyor between the hopper under the table and the color sensing so that it is fully working for the demo.

Progress remains slightly behind the original schedule because of the 3d printing failure but the color sensing has been a big leap back to being on time.

Below are the working hopper with chips being passed through it and the color sensing with the arduinos to release chips into their proper storage.

This week I made meaningful progress bringing the input of the chip sorter prototype together. The two key milestones reached were getting chips moving sequentially through the track reliably, and confirming that the magnet pickup is working consistently. Having both of these functioning together is a significant step forward from last week where I was still validating tolerances and adding magnets to the wheel.

Here is a step by step of the working prototype for the magnet pick up. This week I will be 3d printing all of it in a more solid piece.

Progress is still a bit behind schedule due to the printer downtime from last week, but the working prototype represents a real recovery. This week I hope to do some extra work and printing to catch up. My goal for next week is to integrate servos into the sorter for color-based chip sorting, which will move the project from a mechanical sequencing prototype into a functionally complete sorting system.

This week less forward progress was made as the 3d printer was down. Much of my focus then was on reviewing and refining the centrifugal chip sorter design from last week rather than building the new components. After the transition from the vibration based sorter, I wanted to make sure I have this working consistently so I dont run into the same problems with the new design.

I worked on going back over the tolerances on the chip track to confirm that the dimensions are tight enough to reliably make the chips sequential without jamming. I also got some more magnets into the wheel to see how fast I can pick up chips. No major hardware was assembled but what exists was added to.

losing access to the 3d printer for a couple days was a big problem, its up now but I lost a week of new pieces. I am going to mitigate this by trying to get access to tech spark. My goal for the week is having the sorting system fully prototyped with new access to another printer.

This week I was stuck on the chip return as the original plan detailed in the last blog post.

The vibrations required to get the chips moving through the intake was enough to move the table, so I wanted to switch to centrifugal spinning to get the chips sequential. This is detailed in the design report as I found this out before the paper was written. The design I am testing right now is shown below. It spins the chips into a track that is the exact width and height of a chip so that only one passes through at a time.

Every inch there will be a magnet that attracts the metal cores of the chips so that they can be easily pulled off the wheel and shuttled into a track.

My progress is a little bit behind now that I’ve had to go backwards on the chip ordering. I have tried to catch up over spring break as this was added slack time in our schedule.

I hope to complete the centrifugal chip ordering in the next week.

This week I’ve been finalizing the design for the chip system for our design report and the document we are writing to help outline how everything will work.

At the center of our table we will have a funnel that looks like the image above, I am actively 3D printing this. This puts the chips into a sequential order, which can then be fed into the color sensing that I showed last week. To gain height from the collection in the center of the table, I am also building a track that will act as a vertical conveyor belt. The chips have a metal weight inside them so I will be using magnets to pull them up along this track. At the top of this track the actual color sorting will happen with the use of gravity, into the container imaged below.

Behind each of these stacks I am working on putting a solenoid to push out individual chips onto each players return track.

Overall I think I am near on schedule. 3D design of all these unique parts has been taking longer than I want, but I haven’t done something requiring this much fabrication before so thats sort of expected. We have also had some things we ordered arrived finally, so we can start making progress on things like the RFID scanning and dealer.

This week I would like to have the funnel and color sensing working together.

This week I have been working on the design of the chip return. I have started printing small 3d printed prototypes to test how my mechanism will work. Below is an image of two of the pieces I’ve made. One is a track that lets a poker chip roll through it past the color sensor I am using to sort the chips. The other is a wheel that I will use to break up a bulk input of chips into a sequential order. I am currently designing the way chips will enter my sorting system, I am trying to do a similar idea to a basic coin separating machine but by color as all the poker chips are the same size. I am a little behind as we haven’t received our poker chips yet so I dont know they’re exact dimensions, which is important to some of my prints, so hopefully that will be delivered soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ILHtAPY29I&themeRefresh=1