8/6/14 Assembly

Today was spent assembling the Modular Beast.  Turns out, the tensioner pin holes are too small.  As a result, we had to resort to super glue and fishing line.  Now I know why we never used fishing line before.  On the bright side, the knuckles snap to the RIT Arm palm very well.  Almost too well.  They don't acutally come off.  But that's okay with me, they shouldn't need to.  After adjusting the thumb bend I thought I fixed and widening the finger slots, we started printing a new one.  The RIT Arm should be done by tomorrow, and then we should be ready for the presentation.

Knuckles, fitting to the palm.

Evidence of the knuckles delaminating because the are not flexible.

To fix the delamination of the knuckles, I decided to add a small slot in the center similar to the way the pins are made.  This way the knuckle is flexible enough to not crack when it is attached. This will hopefully be the final change and as we head into our last day we hope to have everything assembled and ready to go.

That's all for today!

Alex + Sam

8/4/14 Final Week Begins

As we enter the final week of this program progress begins to slow. Today we sent off our poster to be printed and if I may say so myself it looks pretty good! At this point we have basically made all of the necessary modifications to the RIT arm and modular beast. We can only work as fast as the printers which unfortunately take hours per print. Today, Sam and Frankie came up with a plan to notch the fingers for the RIT arm so they will work in the new splayed configuration. Further testing will be done on this tomorrow. I (Alex) cleaned up the modular beast model a bit and helped John laser cut some parts for a lamp based on a Thingiverse design.

Today from 4pm-8pm Frankie hosted a group of 11 high school level women engineers and they were planning on assembling John's solar lamps and sending them to less fortunate children in Guatemala. Due to this class and the slow pace of printing, we left the lab a bit early today.

Well that's all for today, hopefully soon we will have all of the parts printed and uploaded to Thingiverse!

Alex + Sam

8/1/14 Finishing Up Drawing and Finishing Poster

Today we made all of the final changes to both the RIT arm and the modular beast so we can begin printing and assembling the models for next week. These parts are fairly large so printing takes quite awhile. In our downtime between prints, work continued on our poster. Because our poster is due on Monday we won't be able to include any actual pictures of these devices, instead we assembled and took screenshots of them in Inventor/Rhino.

One of the modular beast design photos included on our poster.

Although not as exciting as usual, today was a necessary day and we are right on track with completing everything by next Friday for our presentation.

Alex + Sam