In this project, Martin and I designed a hydraulic arm that picks up small objects. Small medical syringes attached to clear plastic tubing retaking and attracting acting as hydraulic moving various parts of the arm. In this project martin and I showed creative and critical thinking to create and manufacture the various parts of the arm, especially the claw.
Part A
Research:
1. Our research only consisted of the package of paper given to us as a reference for our project. This didn’t result in much difficulty or problems other than we had to do everything out of our own brainstorms and head.
2. We Planned out everything we needed to assemble in 4 main parts. Claw, Base, Body, Arm. We planned on the assembly of the arm which led to a much smoother assembly process
3. The main source of our ideas came from the package provided as well as the previous projects left behind everything else we came up with ourselves.
Design:
- Designing was quite simple as we have a general idea of what we wanted but the main issue with this was we did not take into consideration the weight that was being distributed throughout the arm.
- We wanted to do a scoop claw which didn’t work out the way we wanted so we stuck to a simpler-ish claw.
- A design issue we had was syringe placements but was quickly fixed by simply replacing them.
Materials:
- Gathering materials where easy as they were all provided in the shop. The only challenging thing to find was the larger syringes which were limited in supply.
- One problem we had was that some of the materials were not strong enough ex. The hardboard was not firm enough for a claw so I switch the material to the hardboard.
- We needed to find the syringes but we easily got them by scamming people by lending a hand with a problem they had for a syringe.
Construction:
- Constructing the bass and the main body was hard as our hands were a little too big to fit in but we overcame this by placing the materials inside using needle-nose pliers.
- Some of the tubings didn’t fit over the tip of the syringe we Fixed this problem by heating the end with the glue gun and using the heat to stretch the plastic over the syringe.
- The last problem we really had was the claw we could not include the scroop as it was hard to make work, So I made a hardboard claw instead which worked a lot better but it was heavy so we added a counterweight in the base.
Construction #2
- We used the sanding skill to make cardboard circles used for pulleys to give our arm a 360-degree rotation.
- We found that the arm did not have the best vertical range so we incorporated a separate small hydraulic system to help push the block into space where our arm could pick it up.
- We did not have enough strength in the hydraulics to move everything so we switch some of the smaller ones with bigger ones to give the smaller ones extra force.
Part B
Things learned:
- How different things can compliment others. (syringes)
- How that the simpler claws are better than ones that might have benefits but harder to assemble.
- How a little weight distribution can conduct a smoother turning
Part C
Self-evaluation
Grade: A
Martin and I worked very efficiently to finish with a claw that worked smoothly. We had some issues but because of our efficient working, we had time to incorporate a side hydraulic to compliment the main arm. We had all our ideas laid out and followed the 80/20 rule quite well. An improvement we could have made is to not always complicate the situation with more but simplify it with less.
Video:
n/a file too large will send through email.