Fab Academy 2018 - Catherine Blanchard

Exercise 15: Mechanical Design

Group assignment

- design a machine that includes mechanism+actuation+automation - build the mechanical parts and operate it manually - document the group project and your individual contribution

Learning outcomes:

Work and communicate effectively in a team and independently.
Design, plan and build a system.
Analyse and solve technical problems.
Recognise opportunities for improvements in the design.

Have you:

Shown how your team planned and executed the project.
Described problems and how the team solved them.
Listed future development opportunities for this project.
Included your design files, 1 min video (1920x1080 HTML5 MP4) + slide (1920x1080 PNG).

Our team

In this project, we are a group of seven students: six at Opendot, Milan, and one student at Crunch Lab, San Dona’ di Piave (VE).

Brainstorming and team building

Last week, we met at Opendot and talked together about a machine which does something, and in its parts can be useful to our individual final projects. We thought of a ping pong ball shooter to a moving target., and after a brainstorming, we chose to built two machines:

a ping pong ball launcher that will point a guided direction, raising its board and launching the ball through rotating wheels, and a guideline, and will shoot the ping pong balls, built by Laura Cipriani and Massimiliano D'Angelo for the mechanical design; Gianluca De Rossi and Federica Selleri for the machine design;
a remote-controlled target robot which will move at random, stopping and going alternatively, built by Alberto Ongari and Catherine Blanchard for the mechanical design; Francesco Pasino for the machine design.
Both machines will dialogue through a bluetooth communication system

We are very excited! It is almost four months we study and practice together and we feel a team. We understand it is a great deal of complexity and a new adventure to be lived together.

Inspiration

Some of us love soccer, and were fascinated by a professional ball shot machine like the Globus EuroGoal one. Some others love robots, so they thought that the target could be a basket fixed on a remote-controlled mobile robot.