Personal contribution - Design of Internal Components.¶
What are the Internal components?
The internal components are components that will be hidden inside the housing serving a different purposes such as:
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Motor chairs: these chairs will be designed to hold the motor in place below the roof piece.
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Slide: The slide Purpose is collect the pill dispensed from each container and diliver them to door.
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Hangers for the chairs and the slide: those hangers will have slots where the chairs and the slide joints slide in them.
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Other Components: other components that needed adjustments or designing.
Motor chairs:¶
When it comes to the motor chairs I already had an idea about how I wanted them to be, so it was a straightforward and simple design.
You can download the model from here as SLDPRT.
You can download the model from here AS STL file.
To get the exact dimensions I downloaded an external stepper motor design as refrence size:
and here how they turned out after printing:
Slide¶
The slide design was a bit complicated because I thought that it will be as straightforward as the chairs. However, it turned out to be otherwise.
Firstly, I created the first design:
Which apparently had several problems:
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Since I used Loft feature in SolidWorks, the cross-sections get narrower when inclined, therefore, the pathway became so narrow for the pills to pass.
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Since the pathways are enclosed, support was built all the way through the pathways blocking them. And since they are narrow ant tall there is no way to remove the support.
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The joints cross-section were 1 mm x 4 mm (Very thin) and they broke while removing the support.
Hence, I created the second design taking in consideration all the issues that I faced with the first.
You can download the model from here as SLDPRT.
You can download the model from here AS STL file.
Hangers¶
There are 2 type of hangers, the first is for the slide and the second is for the motor chairs. Both will have the same concept, they will fastened with bolts to the roof, and will hve slots for the chairs/slide
Motor chairs hangers¶
This design was simple and straight forwards as well but needed a little bit attention to details. When the motor is seated on these hangers, its shaft must be concentric with the hole of the roof. This is necessary to the dispensing mechanism, the motor must rotate the mechanism smoothly and without and friction to the walls, and this is achieved through the positions of these hangers.
As you can see the split on the side is necessary, because these are too tall to be printed as one part in the printer. Therefore, I split them so they can be printed as two parts that can be assembled together later.
You can download the model from here as SLDPRT.
You can download the model from here AS STL file.
However we had a problem with those, we printed them facing up, which created support inside the slots. And since the slots are already narrow, the support were hart to remove. With each support removed a piece of the part break also.
As you can see from the photo above, the slots are too narrow to remove the support from them without breaking anything.
Hence, we printed them again in this orientation this time:
This time the results came out as desired without support blocking the slots.
Slide hangers¶
They hold the same concept as the hangers of the motor hangers but the for the slides. As the hangers above them, they were easy and straightforward to design.
You can download the model from here as SLDPRT.
You can download the model from here AS STL file.
As you can see the for the slide, I created these small hangers. I printed three of them each on under each dispensing hole.
Roof¶
The roof was very challenging and complicated piece to design since it is the middle part between the dispensing mechanism and the internal parts. So I had to coordinates with my group mate Hassan and his mechanism design and the internal design. All must fit together neatly so the mechanism can run smoothly.
iteration 1¶
Here is the initial design, and you can see it has the split marks since it does not fit entirely in the 3D printer. In this design, you can notice that the hangers are part of the design int this iteration.
Since the part is split in half it needs to be fit together later. Thefore, my group mate ali suggested this puzzle-like joints.
To test the part, we printed the smaller section only first to see the how it would turn out.
This one was printed in the Ultimaker and it looks great above, but since the hangers were below the meshed with the support making them useless. From here, the idea of making a separate hangers that can be bolted in the roof came. Moreover, from this design we concluded that we need to add a slot for the sweeper arm to add extra stability for the cylindrical containers.
Iteration 2¶
This is the the second iteration and the last. As you can see, the hangers are removed and holes for the bolts took their place. In the cylindrical barrier, a slot fot the sweeper arm position is added to provide more support to hold teh cylindrical containers while they rotate. And since the hangers will be bolted in the roof, they will act as bridge that holds the two split parts together; hence, no need for the puzzle-like joints.
You can download the model from here as SLDPRT.
You can download the model from here AS STL file.
Other Components:¶
In the Mechanism that designed by my group mate Hassan Mandeel, I had to adjust the male gear component, it just needed to be a little shorter to fit the other components.
You can download the model from here as SLDPRT.
Results¶
