GearWright?

[Jeff_Birt]

One of the things I do at the university where I work is help out with a design class for undergraduates. It is a hands on class where we have some sort of project and compitition each semester. Our most popular project is building miniture robots to compete on a 8'x8' playing field to score points by pushing pucks into a goal. The basic field has remained the same each time we have done the contest but we try to change something each time to make it interesting. This time we wanted to improve how pucks are added to the arena.

What we came up with was a platform that holds 24 pucks on end. A large gear with a slot in it rotates beneath the platform and the pucks fall out. The large gear is driven by a small gear which will be hooked to a stepper motor. The large gear is almost exactly 14.5" in diameter and has 56 teeth and the small gear is about 4.5" in diamter and has 8 teeth. I cut the parts out on my CarveWright machine yesterday and got them sanded and a coat of snading sealer on this morning.

The gears were generated in CamBam and then exported as a DXF which I brought into AutoDesk Inventor and did a very basic model of how all the parts fit together. A DXF was then exported from Inventor and brought into Designer. The large gear and platform were cut by taping some 1/2" birch plywood to a sled make from a sink cut out. The first image is after the parts were sealed and the second is the model from Inventor.


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Now I have to get the metal bits machined, get it assembled and the software updated to make it run :)

[Digitalwoodshop]

Pretty Coool.... Thought is was a Binary Clock at first.... I get how you got the Vectors....

So how did you do the cut paths? 1/16th End Mill Bit? Locked to 1st Gear by using the 1/4 inch bull nose in designer?

Inquiring Minds want to know.... :mrgreen:

AL

[Jeff_Birt]

Everything was cut with the 1/8" cutting bit. The nice thing with the DXF importer for Designer is that it will connected all the individual lines into objects for you so all you have to do is apply a cut path for each object. All cuts were done in a single pass as well.

[liquidguitars]

Nice to see your CW work!

[b.sumner47]

Great work, Jeff. Capt Barry

[Jeff_Birt]

48551

I got the metal bits machined and the mechanism assembled yesterday. The stepper motor mount had to be enlarged slightly with the Dremel tool to get the correct gear mesh which means new mounting holes will have to be drilled as well. I thought about designing in some adjustment but was stuck on the idea of using T-Nuts for securing the stepper motor. In hindsight it would have been better to build in the adjustment range and machined a flat plate with threaded holes to go underneath and sandwich the wood.

There are a few other things I would do differently next time but I'm happy that at least a functional, and not bad looking, unit resulted from this first/only attempt.

There is still a little work to do on the software to control the stepper motor but that should be sorted out today. There will alos be a cone shaped piece under neath it, so when the pucks fall down they will hit the cone and be diverted sideways. I'll try and take a quick video of the whole field in operation next week.

[mtylerfl]

That's looking really good, Jeff! Thanks for letting us 'watch' while this project comes together!

[Jeff_Birt]

I nixed the spam post. If you guys ever see a post that looks like spam click on the 'Report Post' icon at the bottom of that post (looks like triangle with an exclamation point in it.) This will send an email to the moderators and site admin so we can deal with it.

[Jeff_Birt]

I could not resist cutting out a few more gears today. These elliptical gears are just for fun. They were cut from a scrap piece of 0.20" Luan plywood with the 1/16" cutting bit. The plywood was just cheap stuff and had a little bow to it but the gears came out pretty good anyhow.

And, yes these gears really do work. The both gears rotate on fixed shafts (small holes) but since the holes are off center the speed of the large gear will actually change as it rotates. This type of gear arrangement used to be used in automated machinery but now we have more sophisticated computerized control that can provide the same effect.

[b.sumner47]

Boggles the mind, nce work. Thanks, Jeff



Capt Barry

[Jeff_Birt]

Here is a short video of the puck dropping mechanism in action. I built the main part of the arena a few years ago, as you might notice two of the corners have an 18" circular section that spins and two of the corners flip up. The puck dropper, which had all the wooden parts manufactured on the CarveWright was added this semester. It holds 24 pucks which are 1" slices of 2" poplar dowel rod. The mechanism rotates the shutter (large gear) at random times and will drop 1 or two pucks each time. The pucks hit the cone and then roll all over the place.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2dGVSNi394

[dbfletcher]

Pretty cool Jeff! Nice work!

[Kenm810]

Thanks for the Video Jeff, -- Fun to Watch, Nice Job!