Yolaroid

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,...

Over the past three weeks, we made: the CAD molds for the body, top camera piece, and bottom camera piece; the CAM for the body, bottom camera piece, and top camera piece; and the molds for the body, bottom camera piece, and top camera piece. From the many hours spent manufacturing and the mistakes made we developed a better understanding and intuition for machining. We also faced several complications with the injection molding process including the misalignment of the cavity and core of our body mold; the acquisition of the right sized dowel pins; and the destruction of two tools CAM wasn’t set up correctly. Despite these obstacles, we tackled them, adjusted, and learned from them. We injection molded the body piece and began to understand how to tweak the settings to get the best possible part outcome. The Yolaroid is close to its first assembly run. Machining Experience Using the mill proved to be a time consuming task. With the entire team having little milling experience, machi...

This past week was one of fixing and adjusting our ideas as we move forward. Our main goals were to: 1) CAD and CAM the molds for another camera piece, 2) machine those molds, and 3) injection mold to test our previous set of molds — but we ended up hitting (and resolving) a few other roadblocks along the way. Diann and Lisa started off by trying to test injection molding with the body molds, but many attempts and tries revealed that the diameter of the slot did not match up with the diameter of the cavity. They took the necessary measurements and realized that that we could machine slightly more off of the slot to hopefully fit the molds together perfectly, and will reattempt injection molding next time they go in to lab. Srimayi had created the CAM for the core mold on the camera bottom piece, so she and Albert got to work on machining the mold. During lab, they broke both their first and second tool as the mold was nearly completed 😢but also learned through some mea...

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...

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...