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Click click, pitch

This week, we began designing our yo-yo! From our brainstorming last week, we decided to move forward with the polaroid camera/instagram theme yoyo (henceforth to be known as the Yolaroid).

We aimed to find a balance between aesthetics and potential for creativity, and ultimately felt that this yoyo had the best of both. For one, it's striking! And will look especially cool if we can get the colors right. Secondly, there exists a lot of opportunity for creativity. We had a few ideas that could spin out of the idea:

  • "Flash," or an LED to light up as you yo the yo
  • A button that releases a "polaroid picture" (Picture of what? Stay tuned.)
  • A clear through hole to act as the lense
For this week, we designed our yoyo based on idea #2. We like this one the best, but we'll revisit the other ideas if we have more time and/or want to get fancier later.

 Our design features the following parts:

  • Camera rear body (injection molded)
  • Camera front snap ring top, black (injection molded)
  • Camera front snap ring bottom, white (injection molded)
  • Lens and classic polaroid stripes (thermoformed)

Here is a first pass of our CAD for each of the parts.

The first part is the rear of the camera and the main body of the yoyo. It features a slot and button for the release of a polaroid photo. The next step with this is to identify the spring release mechanism we want to use and incorporate it into the design.


The second and third parts are the bottom and top of the snap ring, which is the camera front. We anticipate the two to snap onto the rear body, and for the top and bottom parts of the snap ring to snap into each other. Finding the tolerances for this will be the next step.

     


The fourth and final piece is the thermoformed lens featuring the classic Polaroid stripe. We're hoping to print onto the plastic to generate the multicolored stripes to minimize the actual number of colored plastics that we need for manufacturing. 


To create the full CAD, we assembled the parts and mirrored across the center place. Our final yo-yo would look like this! 




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