Technologies used:
| C++/Arduino | ESP32 | Stepper Motor Controllers | Solidworks/Fusion | Laser cutting |
|---|
Newton’s second law states that the torque acting on the container will act in an equal and opposite direction on the cables holding the container. Adding a second motor with a mass will counteract this issue.
Early concept:
MATLAB script to calculate design constraints —> Solidworks + Fusion CAD
Housing and container assembled!
Motor Control Board:
Two A4988 stepper drivers and an ESP32 connected to a 24V power supply.
These controllers were cheap (perfect for a college project), but also very electrically fragile. Between tuning and wiring, they broke often. During this project, over 15 drivers went up in “magic” smoke.
The two main challenges with this project were:
Motor controllers breaking and causing jerky movement
The biggest challenge was diagnosing what caused this behavior in the first place. As deadlines approached, there was no time to order new motor controllers and integrate them into the system. Success hinged on wiring the controllers perfectly each time - a skill I had to learn quickly.
Centering the counterweight
Tolerance stack-up of the steel disks and an imperfect shaft collar meant off-axis rotation. I solved this issue by 3D printing a cylinder perfectly shaped to align all the disks. Some manual adjustment was needed for the shaft collar.
https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/0db4ccad-8962-476a-803e-3eacc1c30920/IMG_6858.mov?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAT73L2G45EIPT3X45%2F20230312%2Fus-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20230312T082031Z&X-Amz-Expires=86400&X-Amz-Signature=205e0ce74a9b95d51f9e057693cf0e3b2d5de15948deba20a7ec7155365ef069&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&x-id=GetObject
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