Assembly and Materials

For assembly we 3D printed the Geneva Mechanism, motor interface which I will explain further in this section, and bottle mover (this is what transfers the motion of the 8 bar to the bottles). For everything else, including the tray, the linkages, the support structure, and many more, we exclusively used laser cutting. There was a lot of wood in our project since we didn't have any substances forces or loads and the materials is very easy and quick to work with. Initially we were planning on doing this project with full sized coke bottles but realized that a scaled down version would be much more manageable.

We knew that for timing purpose we wanted both the driving link of the 8 bar mechanism and the Geneva mechanism to have the same angular velocity. one full rotation of the 8 bar means the "D" shaped path is completed once and one full rotation of the Geneva driving gear means the clover will rotate only one interval. By connecting the tray to a 6 leafed Geneva clover, this means that for six bottles, every time the motor will rotate once, then one bottom will be moved and the tray will rotate 1/6 of a full rotation or 60 degrees. The geneva clover was securely attached to the tray, which was supported by a rotary table similar to a Lazy Susan to attempt to create a frictionless motion.

To achieve the same angular velocity we created a motor adapter that could rotate the Geneva driver via a belt, but also rotate the 8 bar linkage via a square drive. This was of course accomplished with spacing in mind and making sure the motor was still securely fastened. Below is a picture of the cad file which eventually got 3D printed to become our final iteration. This adapter was contained a D slot on its underside which the motor D driver utilized. The gear section drove the belt and the square part on top was what drove the 8 bar. The round midsection was actually being held in a bearing which was imbedded in the wooden board that acted as the base for the platform which the bottles slide on as well as the base for the 8 linkages.

Also, we used an Arduino to control the speed and direction of the DC motor and linkage movement.

Motor Driver Gear: