Masterpiece development documetary

Hello everyone~

I am back again to show you my blog of this semester! I will be sharing with you an awesome project design that my team and I have came up with after acquiring and practicing the skills we learnt in the previous blogs such as laser cutting, 3D printing Arduino and even some handy crafting skills. My stupendous team consisting of Shaira, Sanjana, Ryan and I are extremely happy that we have completed the aim of our chemical device we have been designing. 

1.    Our team Chemical Device

What's the problem?

From reading many newspaper articles and online news, my group and I have realized that drink driving has been on the rise lately and we are extremely not happy with this idea. We believe being irresponsible by driving after you driving is not forgivable and in an incident that an accident happens, not only does the victim family get affected but also the driver's family as they feel equally guilty. Hence to halt this problem once and for all but team has decided to make a device that will utterly stop this nonsense.

Idea?!

Our team came up with a bright idea of instead of having police officers stop and check if drivers are drunk, the car can do it itself. This will increase the efficiency of the work done when it is automatic instead of manual. We also aimed to make it very safe by making is on standby 24/7. So whenever the car is started, this system automatically turns on and analyses the alcohol in the air. Lastly it is also superbly minimalistic so it can fit in almost every car with a very low capital cost and operating cost. So... as you guessed it, it is a breath anaylzer inbuilt into a car.

Digital sketch of design layout

  2. Team Planning, allocation, and execution

Chief Executive Officer (CEO): Shaira

Chief Financial Officer (CFO): Ryan

Chief Operating Officer (COO): Alex(Me!)

Chief Security Officer(CSO): Sanjana

This is our finalised BOM table that we have stuck to throughout the project

Gnatt chart excel

Allocation of designing tools

*insert laser cutting animation from prevention slide*

Before allocating the task to each one of the group’s member, we have decided to choose the appropriate designing strategy for each part of your breath analyzer.

We firstly decided that the the box covering the throttle pedal will the a product of a strong acrylic material that will withstands the pressure should the driver step on it when he/she is drunk.

The next we wanted to use 3D printing on the gears and chain as we were taught that they do the best at intricate designing. We envisioned our chain to be a small complex design that will move freely even when they are fixed together hence we believe 3d printing will be the way to go.

Arduino was simply going to be our electronic controller that will receive signal from the alcohol detector and send signal to our servo motor.

what is so unique about it is:

Automated 

- Drunk users do not need to operate the product.

- They are drunk so operating it themselves will have flaws and complications involve

Reliable 

- Breath analyser is always working

- It would be on once the car is turn on

Safe 

- It only activates when the car is not in motion.

- It is unsafe for the box to suddenly cover the accelerator pedal when the car is in motion. 

- So our team decided to have the device at work when the car is stationary. 

 

Compact 

- It fits almost perfectly into a car 

- it is also customizable for every car. This is because every car is different from each other. Especially the accelerator pedal. So for each model of car there would be a different size box. 

- No awkward extruding parts that would hinder the drivers ability to drive. 

 

Affordable.

-  It is cheap so that everyone can afford it.

- It has to be in every car, or every driver has to have it in their car, so it is cheap for everyone 

- This makes it so there is no exclusivity too. 

3.    Design and Build Process

In this section, I will provide documentation of the design and build process.

Part 1. Design and Build of Part A (done Sanjana and I). Link it to Sanjana’s blog.

Laser cutting😆😆

Before Sanjana did the laser cutting in the fablab, I had sketched out the the outline of the acrylic box meant to cover the throttle/acceleration pedal in the car. From some research we found that most cars have a throttle pedal of dimensions 3.4 by 10.7 by 4.7(height, length and breath). So from this we made sure to make allowance and decided to give an allowance of 3mm. This makes the dimensions 3.7cm by 11cm by 5cm. After finding the dimensions of the acrylic box for laser cutting we book a time slot in fab lab and went to cut out the pieces the next day. However, on the day we realized there we did not account for the thickness for the acrylic so we had to do a little redesigning. We chose the 5mm thick acrylic so as to make the walls of the cover as strong as possible to avoid it from collapsing. Using the thickness we made the base piece wider and longer by 5mm and completed our laser cutting on that day itself.

This is a sketch of the acrylic box:

The actual acrylic sheets:

After that I went to learn the proper way on how to glue the slabs of acrylic by having the amazing Ms Serene to teach me. We had to use a needle to accurately glue the pieces together. It was really tricky as we have to leave a space of air before sucking up some glue so that it doesn’t touch the silicone suction cap. However as I had to do the 3D printing at the same time, I relayed the information on how to properly glue to Sanjana and she had done the rest.

Part 2. Design and Build of Part B (done by Ryan and I).

3D Printing designs

We have thought of many ideas for our gear and chain idea to succeed. First, we thought of using a real bike chain and to buy a small and big gear that fits the bike chain and use it for our prototype. However with the challenge given to us which was to incorporate 3D printing, laser cutting as well as coding, we thought this will be the best choice we can make to incorporate 3D printing.

I started researching the online platforms for any gear and chain for inspiration an found many interesting ideas such as rack and pinion and silent chain as shown below.

After more digging, we settle for the gears and chain from this website

The chain body

Explanation:

After some consideration we decided to make this chain body as it's the simplest to design and easiest to connect. Below is a link to easily make the chain body. This chain body has a thickness of 3mm and there will be two chain body in one link segment which has to be accounted for later on.

How to make chain body

The pin 

Explanation:

This part is very simple, just by measuring the inner diameter of the chain body, we minus 3mm of the inner diameter to give some spacing for the pin to slot into the chain body while connecting them together. Creating this was extremely easy, simply sketch a circle 1.5 times the inner diameter of the chain body and extrude 3mm.

Next, extrude the center of the circle with an inner diameter 3mm smaller than the chain inner diameter by 15mm. This creates the longer part of the pin. One last step is to make a small indent at the tip of the long shaft, this is necessary to insert the tab to secure the chain bodies and spacer together.

The spacer

Explanation:

The spacer is another very simple design. It has the same outer diameter as the chain body. Since the pin is 15mm and the two chain body is 3mm each, the spacer will fill the rest of the volume in between. This makes the thickness of the spacer around 9mm. To allow it to loosely fit the chain so that the chain is flexible while glued, we gave is a 0.5mm clearance so the final thickness is 8.5mm.

The tab

Explanation:

The tab is the last part that completes our beautiful chain design. It is necessary as it holds the chain bodies and spacer in place. This can be done by sketching a circle same diameter as the big circle on the pin and extruding it by 3mm to make it not too thin. Then we will extrude a small protrusion same diameter as the small in dent as the pin while giving a 0.2mm clearance so it fits properly.

Final chain link product

 

 

Gears

We decided to make a torque multiplier. One gear was given to us in the website and we used it as our big gear which was our driver gear. To make a torque multiplier, we had to make a follower gear smaller. We then used fusion 360 to decrease the size of the original gear by 75%. This can be seen below.

However we soon realized that the minimized chain does not fit and we found out that the teeth were too small. This made us realize we had to redesign a gear such that the size of each teeth and the spacings between each teeth must compliment the chain that we are working with hence my group mate, Ryan went to learn some skills on Youtube for us to re design the smaller gear.

This is the link my Ryan's blog: Ryan's fascinating blog

Part 3. Design and Build of Part C (done by Ryan and I). Link it to Hawkeye’s blog

3D printing assembly

After the 3D printings, we had to do our duty of sanding and filing each part of the chain and gear to make them smooth and to avoid any hiccups when they are put to the test. This step was really tedious and I meant REALLY tedious as we had 24 chain links which 5 parts per chain link. However with our due diligence me and Ryan managed to finsh this task in less than 2 days.

I was then tasked to superglue the pieces of tabs to the pin on every chain link and here was the result. I had actually specially print on set of chain body in different colours so everyone could see the intricate design of each and every chain link.

Finally after a pain experience in sanding and filing the parts we finally put together the whole system shown down below.

Part 4. Programming of motor and lcd (done by Shaira). Link it to Black widow’s blog

Link to shaira's blog: Shaira's amazing journey in Programming

Part 5. Integration of all parts and electronics (done by Shaira)

Link to Shaira's blog: Shaira's interesting Journey on integrating all parts

After much consideration and tough decision this is the final product we came up with!

This is a video of our working product 

 

4.    Problems and solutions

In this section I will describe the problems encountered in the design and build process and how the team solved them.

·      Problem 1 and how we solved it

Laser cutting sizing:

Originally I had forgotten about the thickness of the acrylic slabs and did not include the extra spacing for the top slab. This made the box not well build and had gaps in between. As an OCD person I re-did the design so that it looks neater more refined.

·      Problem 2 and how we solved it

Gear teeth sizing:

This part was pretty confusing at first. Before realising the gear teeth sizing was the problem, I just scaled down the sized of the given gear, however I realise I was just lazy and I had to design a gear myself. After printing the first draft it really didn’t work well as the teeth’s had different sizes but have same number of teeth which did not make sense. So after so YouTube videos Ryan and I design another gear with lesser teeth but they have the same size as the original gear. This made it so that the teeth of the gear could fit into our chain. With the teeth smoothly following through the chain we realise actually design gear and chain with 3D printing can be done but it was really tedious. To make it turn smoothly without the chain dropping off, we had to sand the teeth so that no support material will obstruct the chain when turning. The chain also consisted of many parts which made sanding of the whole chain a real pain in the ass. However I was very lucky to have a motorised sander at home and I could save a lot of time for the 3D printing part which was really lucky of me.

·      Problem 3 and how we solved it

Group synergy:

It was really tough to communicate to be honest as only two of the group members were really on the ball the other two were less bothered and didn’t pay much attention. Of course those two who constantly did work were unsatisfied with the teams behaviour and really did not have time to talk to them about it due to all the examinations. This called for really bad team planning and communication at first where only 2 members are always discussion and  sharing informations, and the other two were minding their own business and avoiding task.  However instead of alienating them and just continue to “carry” the team we still decided to ask them and give them simpler task to join in and try. This was what I felt great, but we still were not progressing any faster. This was until I was able to talk to one of the group member I was closer to, to be more participative and attentive. This small talk really did work and I was extremely satisfied with his behaviour. I really thank him for helping whatever he could during our crunch time, he was also really responsible and told us his availability beforehand to warn us. However our last member is really difficult and hard to work with, I definitely need more patience, to be more mature to even do something about that situation which I knew I couldn’t do hence it became a 3 man team. All in all, I really understand and appreciated good teammates, teammates who are responsible, understanding and understandable as well as minimally attentive of current situations. I also believe small talks and getting a person to open up really works well in a team and I am great I could experience it this time round.

 ·      Problem 4 and how we solved it

System integration:

We envision our parts to work properly with each other however, after putting then together We realised our 360°step motor did not have enough torque even though we made the gear a torque multiplier. This caused two problems. First was that the chain were immovable as they weighted to much for the motor to move. Second was the arcrylic box was way to heavy yo be lifted up. So from these we immediately took action. We had to remove the chain and change the material of the box for covering the throttle pedal. Since it was just a prototype we switched the box to cardboard to show and simulate what is suppose to happen in our presentation. In addition since we removed the chain, our two gears spun in different directions hence we added a idler gear to solve this issue instead of re-editing the code that we have programmed for the motor. This was a very good call as programming the codes were not our strength and we would have wasted too much time. Looking back I was proud of our decision on this as we really needed the time to complete the integration of all the parts and could not spare any time to re-code our motor.

 

5.    Project Design Files as downloadable files

In this section, I will provide all the design files (Fusion360 files, .dxf files, .stl files, arduino programs files) as downloadable files.

Surprises awaiting to be opened!

 

6.    Below is my Learning Reflection on the overall Project Development.

Looking back at the whole project from dawn to dusk it had really been a rollercoaster of a journey. It was safe to say there where insane memories latched into my brains that I will definitely remember. 

One most important thing I still cannot get by is our lack of initiative. There may be many reasons for this ie, its a big project to be done in just one term, we are all having examinations almost all the time, it was our first time designing and actually MAKING a product and we are not very fluent in the tools that we have to use such as arduino and 3D design. However this does not mean we should procrastinate and just push things back. This mistake was really noticeable and I definitely did not feel good to do a project while having a constant crunch time.

On the other hand, this journey has been really enriching as we not only practised our hard-skill like all the designing, tool handling and coding. We also made progress in our soft skills as a person. Communication did gradually improve and teamwork was too. 

There were many difficulties when doing the 3D printing as we used gears. The most memorable was the teeth sizing and space between each teeth. It was our first time designing gears and truly have gears working together coherently was challenging without any prior knowledge on its design. This all changed when we researched on how to actually design them and their fundamentals. Arduino was also brain pinching. Having to re-modify codes retest, finding that it doesn’t work really still makes my teeth grind. Its really infuriating for not knowing the reason why the codes don’t work especially when my team changed the motors and had to change the codes again. One thing that made this experience worse was the cytron website tutorial was in malay which I could hardly understand let alone code. After sometime however I slowly found the beauty of coding. The success of a code is really a sight to smile at but what was more important was the journey. Figuring out which part of the code did not work and fixing it felt phenomenal. Through that each and every error u fix is an experience that will latch onto your brain as it takes a hella long time.

The soft skills i acquired from ICPD was really helpful when working with a team. However this time round the word “perseverance” really stuck up to me. I could remember clearly test 2 of our core module was gruesome and everyone was beaten after the test, but my group was delighted as they could finally start with the making of our chemical product. Despite all of them saying they were exhausted mentally, they all wanted to do their part in this project and hence they persevered. It was quite encouraging to see all of them putting the same energy and effort as I was and that was really what kept me going.

We also learnt to give and take. We learnt the strengths and weaknesses of each other and accounted for everyones weakness with our strength. Although some definitely give more and some take more, we were still satisfied with the outcome of our teams synergy. An example was when I was originally tasked to do the arduino coding which I really am weak at, Shaira and Ryan pointed out that they actually having fun coding and for me I do love using fusion 360 and have some ideas so how gears and chain work as I love cycling, we decided to switch our task allocation. This made not just me happy but also allow Shaira and Ryan to do what they prefer and enjoy. 

Last but not least though this whole experience I really understood the importance of support. The support given to me was immense, I remembered how nice Ms Serene was when teaching me how to apply acrylic glue and the 3D printing. It was all her and she really did it amazing. Mr Chua was also very kind he put his mind into giving me options when we are stuck at a hurdle. Telling me the sources of where the items come from to teaching my team how to work better efficiently. I am really thankful to have this opportunity to design a product as I know how fortunate I am to do them. Thank you to my team who have stuck with me from the beginning till the end and made my year 2 semester 2 a tiring yet memorable one.