Our main goals were to achieve the following operations in said order:
- Crush a water bottle with high torque
- Quickly push the water bottle out of the machine
- Quickly return crushing link
- Return pushing link
- Repeat
Another limitation was to implement only 1 DC Moter to achieve all of these motions as a way to introduce complexity to our design.
With these goals in mind, we had to choose a mechanism that could employ not one but two quick return operations while maximizing torque on the crushing motion. We took our greatest inspiration from a Whitworth Quick return mechanism. Below is an example of said mechanism.