Skip to main content

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 will use based on the strength of the magnets (they will have to be relatively strong because they will be separated by an air and plastic-filled gap) and the size of them. Some good sources of magnets that are about the correct size are the magnets used on the littleBits and on the magnetic reading glasses, known as Click Its.

We also looked at the issues we had with our mold and the feasibility of designing it the way we intended. We decided that it would be easier for the lens to shift entirely down to the bottom piece because it would created fewer odd shapes in our mold without seriously affecting our design aesthetics. As you can see in the picture above, the lens is now entirely sitting on the bottom half of the camera. In addition, we shelled our two snap pieces, reduced the number of pegs from 10 to 6, shortened and fattened the extruded area around the lens, and removed the additional ledge on the body part that was inherited from the LMP yoyo (originally to guide the snap ring).




Manufacturing (Mold) Updates
We also created our molds and the accompanying CAM. We used the sprue and ejector pin files that we were provided to map out the holes that we need in the core and cavity pieces. When we go to machine, we will start by drilling the center holes on the core and the cavity. 

The Cavity
First, we will center drill the center hole in the cavity piece (tool #15), and then we will drill through the rest of the material (tool #17). Then we will face the whole surface using tool #18 and use an adaptive tool path to do the inside area where the body will be (tool # 12). Afterwards, we finish the cavity by scalloping the inside of the body area around the edges (using tool #12) and completing a 2D contour with tool #10.
The Adaptive Tool Path for the Inside Section with the Body

The overall picture of the cavity.
The Core
On the core side, we start by drilling out the holes where the ejector pins will be. Again we start with center drilling using tool 15 before doing the deep drilling with tool 16. Then, we drill the holes for our pegs, which are not through holes using tools 15 and 2. Next, we do adaptive drilling with tools 12 and 1 to form the yoyo piece and to make the slot. And we finish up with contouring and putting in the middle pocket using tools 2, 14, and 6.


Creating the pocket at the end

 Adaptive tool path to create the slot for the photo

Adaptive tool path for the top face


Final Core

We are excited to start machining our molds!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Capturing Our Desired Design

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve experienced some machining set-backs, but we have successfully machined all of our molds (except the photo mold, which will be machined today in class!). We have created our first assembled yoyo, which can be seen in the picture at the right . One of the issues that we had was that we accidentally machined our holes too large for our dowel pins, so we had to remachine the cores of the top and bottom camera piece with a smaller diameter. We then had to ream our holes and press fit in our dowel pins. We learned that the difference between what should work in paper and what does in real life is significant: our holes needed to fit 5/64” pins, but we ended up only reaming to .076” because the holes were too large the previous time. This time they fit perfectly, which was super satisfying for our team. Previously, we had used Loctite, which had super inconsistent results - one of our dowel pins fell into the mold and the other one broke right off. We al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Choosing an idea

This past Friday we had our first team meeting! We each came up with five to ten potential yo-yo designs and pitched it to the group. Here were some of the original ideas and sketches we made! To help us narrow down our decisions, we came up with some design criteria that were important to us. We decided that our yo-yo needed to be creative, exciting, functional, and feasible. Using our design criteria and through some difficult voting, we finally narrowed it down to four. Amazingly and by sheer luck, each of us had an idea picked to be in the final four, which made it easy to split up the work! Over the weekend, each of us designed our own idea. Here were the four finalists!   Works of art if you ask me. Finally, today, we chose the design we would be making for the rest of the semester. We really like all of the ideas and ultimately voted (via the very scientific Facebook Messenger poll) with the polaroid because it was creative but hopefully still str...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 rin...
Post a Comment
Read more