Starting this monday, may 6, I came in and saw that the redesigned base printed successfully and is much sturdier than the previous design. I’m glad this change was made as the display is much sturdier and does not shake as much when the motor is running. I also began printing some extra coupler pieces (granted one broke as I was taking off the coupler from the bottom gear), motor to one-way bearing attachments, middle gears, and bottom gears.

All four of the top fly wheels that say “Boca Bearings” have successfully printed without any major errors. The only issues I did notice was some possibly burnt filament within the part, causing some scarring. I was able to easily sand away any of these imperfections. I also solidified the color scheme for the project to make the display as a whole look seamless, using a light blue base, gold bottom gears, red middle gears, and the dark blue flywheel.

The original idea was to use different colored bases to indicate the different bearings but keeping the colors consistent will produce a more visually appealing project. The only downside to this is that the bases take up more than half a roll of filament, requiring essentially one roll per tower. As of Wednesday I started printing a new tower that had some severe printing issues (missing layers, shifted layers, etc), causing all that filament to not be usable. Before I leave for this weekend, I started another tower base to print which will take a little over 2 days to finish.

The gears have also been undergoing minor improvements through each test to ensure that the spacing between gears is secure, trying to avoid warping of the gears while printing, and ensuring the pegs of the gears fit securely into the bearing so the fast speeds don’t allow for it to come apart.

For a good part of Friday, I worked on the electronic component of the project, soldering the arduino to an empty PCB and soldering some of the connections. To better regulate the power, we are using a buck convertor which can easily reduce the 9 volts that come through the wall to 5 volts that the arduino can handle. Without doing this, it’s highly possible the electronics could overheat too much and possibly fry the motherboard. 

I am hoping that the base that is currently printing comes out successfully without any major errors so I can start working on connecting each towers’ motor to the electronics housing.

Power Control Board; in Progress