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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Getting in focus

This week, we made many changes to our design for manufacturing and design-related reasons. We finished machining 3 of the 4 molds for injection molding, created a plan for the design of our magnetic photo piece, printed on plastic and successfully thermoformed the camera lens, and tested injection molding for two of our pieces (including checking the snap fit on the pegs). Things seem to be in good shape! Check out our progress sheet here . Machining At this point, machining hurdles are somewhat expected — but it seemed like we ran into many this week! The CAM for the camera front pieces (both top and bottom) proved difficult for two main reasons: (1) For the camera bottom piece, it was nearly impossible to generate a tool path that successfully removed enough material for the snap fit of our very small magnet. After trying horizontals, pencils, and several other finishing paths, we finally found the settings to sufficiently clean up the magnet hole (with a scallop,...

Setting up our first (SNAP)SHOTS!

It's crunch time now! This week we made a lot of great progress and now have a more concrete plan for the rest of the semester. Here is our manufacturing schedule for the yolaroid! Yolaroid Manufacturing Schedule for this last week and the upcoming week Our biggest achievement this week is we made our first molds in lab! It took us a while to figure out how to use the mill but doing our first bit of machining together was a great learning experience. It didn't take us too long with the staff to start familiarizing ourselves with the mill and our first molds for the Yolaroid body came out really well! Maybe by the end of the semester we will be just as one with the machine as Joe! First Yolaroid molds! For lab this week, we are ready to begin injection molding the Yolaroid body as a team. Working as a team to walk through machining the molds as well as injection molding will allow us to split up some work for making the other molds and injection molding pie...

Making Our Polaroid More "Attractive"

This week we have several new design and manufacturing updates. On the design side, we started to look more closely at the feedback we received at our last presentation and to finalize our plan for the solution that will allow us to take the photo(s) that we will make in and out of the polaroid. On the manufacturing side, we created our mold for the body part and the corresponding CAM. Design Updates At our last class, we were still trying to decide how we wanted to incorporate the polaroid picture piece that would come out of our yoyo. We initially thought of doing some kind of spring-loaded application (similar to an SD card reader), but this past week we settled on the idea of doing magnets. One of the magnets will be on the "photo" (which we decided to injection mold instead of thermoform) and the other one will be press fit into the front of the yoyo next to the "camera's lens" (shown below). We are still trying to figure out which kind of magnets we w...

Yolaroid

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