Fabrication and Assembly:

The mechanism was designed through SolidWorks and fabricated with the use of 3D printers. The primary iteration processes revolved around the bracket setup and motors. The assembly was originally meant for two Arduino motors, but the torque required for horizontal movement was too much, so a servo was used in place. Additionally, the placement of the slider rods required a unique bracket design, so we could not just implement the provided metallic brackets on a base.

For the conveyor belt itself, we hand-sewed a 15” x 3.80” piece of canvas together. We chose canvas as the fabric, as it is sturdy while also being slightly stretchy. It had to be able to support the obstacles, but stretch around the supports to have resistance.

Electronics:

We used an Arduino UNO together with the class-provided motor controller to control our system. For user input, we had a joystick so that you could move side to side and jump, hooked up to the Arduino analog I/O pins. Power was provided by a 12V battery to the motor controller to power the rest of the systems. The jumping motor was one of the class-provided motors that was connected to the motor controller. Our slider crank motor was connected to a digital I/O pin on the Arduino.

Open

Software:

The software itself was fairly simple, simply reading the joystick’s x and y axes from -1 - 1 to power the motors. The slider crank motor was a continuous rotation servo that scaled the motor's power by the x-axis of the stick. We wanted the jumping motion to always be a consistent amount, so the motor was just set to a constant power if the y-axis was above a certain amount.