14.6 Conclusion and Future Work

Conclusion:

Overall, our project accomplished its aim of developing a 3D cam that was able to have a program written onto it that was able to direct our steering path into the programmed path from the 3D Cam. However, we were unable to get the drivetrain to properly interface with the gears and pulleys due to our parts being two weeks late and being incorrectly delivered as well. This severely cut into our testing and iterating phase for our final design, and as such had to make do with the parts around us. However, if we had the correct parts and two weeks to iterate, we are confident we would have had a moving Da Vinci car.

Future work:

For the future, we would like to get the Da Vinci car running with the wheels and cam at the same time, which would require the appropriate gears instead of the myriad of belt and pulleys we used. We would like to be able to have the accurate measurements of the gears and any belts and pulleys we may use to laser cut accurate shaft placements instead of slots on the side wall. In addition, we would also like to have bearings in the shaft holes to ensure smooth motion and no binding, as well as having shafts run through the sides of the car so they are not cantilevered and susceptible to bending forces. To go beyond the basic function of having the Da Vinci car run both shaft and wheels at the same time, we would also like to implement a type of reloading feature so that the 3D Cam is continuous instead of finite. We were given the idea of a type of magazine reload by Professor Symmank, and we were also thinking of a spring-loaded restarting mechanism, where as the follower reaches the end of the program, its tensioned tightly down and compresses a spring. As the tension is released, the follower shoots back up, and another mechanism is able to move the follower back to the opposite side of the car to restart the program.

Tips:

For future groups wanting to work with a 3D Cam, we highly recommend doing any planning and CAD work with the 3D Cam first, as it is most likely going to be the hardest part. Do not try to test only when the 3D Cam is fully done; test on smaller iterations with only two or three spirals to see if your follower has any problems, such as being too wide, binding while following the path, or not properly contacting the 3D Cam as it moves. Printing the 3D Cam will most likely take alot of time to 3D print so make sure you have a printer outside TIW as the odds are very small it will be under 6 hours of print time. It will most likely take the majority of the day and eat lots of filament for the supports, so plan accordingly! Peeling off the supports for the 3D Cam also takes about 45min to make it usable so it is absolutely not something that can be done last minute.

Lessons Learned:

We learned a very important lesson on waiting for parts and improvising. Sometimes things are out of your control, and you must be able to improvise with what you have around you instead of sticking with an obsolete plan. We also learned a very valuable lesson in writing down metrics, values, and dimensions, as we were constantly forgetting values we had talked about in meetings where no one had written anything down. Since we needed to constantly reference these values for computation and CAD, and were not using a collaborative software like OnShape, we put all our agreed-upon metrics, measurements, target values, and part dimensions into one Google Sheets page. With this page, we were able to keep track of everything instead of constantly asking one another what we had agreed on and debating who said what and when.

Acknowledgments:

A huge thanks is given to group 18, Marco-AFM Probe, for giving us the extra pulley belts they had, which, without them, would have been extremely hard to have even the rudimentary drivetrain that we did.