This week the pancake printer got some attention other than from our robotics class. WGAL’s Lori Burkholder, and a reporter from the York Daily Record came by and talked with each of us about our projects and how each of them started. Lori Burkholder said she would email our teacher when our story would be aired so we are all excited about that. As far as the York Daily Record, if you look back on a later post from our teacher you will see our video interview with the reporter. Continue reading The Future of the Pancake Printer →

This week with the pancake maker we have experimented with a lot of batter and many ideas. We were finding that our original bottle for our printer was too big of a hole for the batter and so it would just easily flow out and was not what we wanted. So we thought about what would be best to use that has a small hole at the end and will also stop whatever is inside it from flowing, and that is when we thought of a baby bottle.  Continue reading Baby Bottle to the Rescue →

Here is the CNC Rounter cutting out the X-axis brackets for the Pancake Printer…

and, the finished parts…

Quick update on weekly posts, we have decided that from now on that we will create one new post the discusses everything that we have done over the week rather than two separate ones that give half and half.

This week with the pancake printer we got to work right away to put more together with the Y component and how the batter bottle will be held while pouring the batter. Continue reading Hardware over software →

The Pancake Printer needed a custom wood part, so we went to the CNC router.  Here it is…

This week, my partner having nearly completed the “zero” function, I took to more of the hardware side of things.  In order for “zero”, our last big function, to work a limit switch is mounted to each axis (Y and X). the program will then utilize the switches by sending the header towards its axis’ limit switch till it presses the switch. As the switch is pressed a high signal is sent to pin 1 and the program sends the header back out to the middle of the skillet, Following this action a similar process will take place to move the skillet to a set zero point.  Attaching the switch was a feat in itself as its position was perpendicular to the metal it was to be mounted to. I fashioned a part made of some scrap steel that i cleaned up. To mount the switch two holes were drilled for the switch to attach to the metal piece, and two, one for each screw, to attach the metal to the metal frame of the y axis.

to follow up on the U/I, user interface , the new ‘LCD backpack’ unit  arrived earlier this week and was promptly installed. The U/I is now fully functional and directly controls the printer.

This week was a back and forth process but in the end I believe that we have made progress. Right away on Monday while my partner worked on getting the LCD display to work properly with the potentiometers I finished Continue reading Three steps forward, one step backward →