When it comes to larger, personal engineering projects, I’ve struggled to see things through to completion due to lack of resources (money, time, space) more often than not, sadly. As demonstrated by the Cribbage Board project, though, I do my best to come back to projects even if they spend a long time in limbo.
At the time of writing, personal projects are on an unofficial hiatus due to my time being devoured by graduating this semester. I’m working on taking my last course, writing a journal paper, compiling my master’s thesis, and searching for jobs, but I am excited to return to these projects.
Here is some WIP CAD of my first go at making an antweight combat robot. It is a servo based suplexing lifter bot. The main area that I prototyped so far was casting my own wheels using flexible silicones, with some results shown below.
Another project I’m working on is making my own pen plotter with the goal of using sharpie markers to draw my own versions of card games. I’ve tested various methods of lifting and moving cards and found the suction motor above to be the option I plan to implement. I want the device to be similar to a 3D printer motion gantry with toolchanging and the ability to pick and place single playing cards. The rest of the design work so far developing a list of engineering requirements and drawing outline sketches of the system that need to be CADed to progress this progress. The card on the bottom shows results from an experiment to see how fast a sharpie dries out compared to how effect a loose cap is.
Here’s an example of some ideation sketching I do when working on new projects. This project hopes to make a mechanical 7-segment clock driven by a single motor by the use of geneva-mechanism-like indexing between digits, plus cams that shift segments in and out of the clock face.