Our design goal in this project was to recreate the traditional motion of a carousel, where the poles move up and down while rotating about the center with one servo, we needed to brainstorm ways to link these two movements together. The way we decided to do this was to use a gear for rotational motion and a sliding linkage for vertical motion. To combine these into one design our initial idea was to have one fixed pole, on which five sliding joints would be placed. This "fixed pole"/"stationary pole" was placed slightly off-center so that as the sliders rotated about it, depending on the position of the slider, the slider length protruding from the main ring would be either longer(pulling the pole downwards) or shorter (pushing it upwards).
Our initial plan, shown in the image below, was to have two gears, one attached to the servo and one fixed to the bottom of the main ring, we soon realized this would not be a viable option because the fixed pole which is slightly off-center needed to extend through the main ring and mount to the base of the carousel, meaning the middle of the device needed to be open.
To achieve this, we instead opted to mount all the poles to a sun gear that the inside servo powered gear would rotate. This meant the ring would be mounted on the outside and an opening in the middle would provide room for the fixed pole to mount to the base.
We also decided to minimize the amount of 3d printed material as much as possible due to its high fail-rate and instead designed joints that could be made with only laser cutting. These joints feature a wooden bead and dowel rod held between two laser-cut parts. We made this design choice to decrease manufacturing time and increase the unity of our design by sticking to primarily wooden parts.
