Week 10/12 - 10/16
I started the week by trying to figure out the issue with the PCB on the R2D2. There weren't any continuity issues ao theoretically every component was being powered. Mr. Christy came over to take a look at it and also couldn't find any problems that would lead to it not working. He suggested that I move on to other projects as he didn't want this to take up so much of my year, because it is an electrical engineering project and he knew I wanted to focus on mechanical engineering. Hopefully later in the year I will be able to fix it, but for now the R2 is getting put aside.
When looking at projects to make I figured it would be good to start with some of the more fundamental things that are contained within bigger components. With that being said I decided to learn more about the design and uses of different types of gears. The first type of gear I looked into was planetary gears. These systems consist of a gear in the middle, referred to as the sun gear, with any number of gears surrounding it, called planet gears, which have to be equal in size. All of this is then contained within a ring. I got to work on creating the gears. Since I am more focused on thr system itself and less on the one specific gear I used a shortcut to create the gears. Fusion automatically has a spur gear script built in which I used to create the sun and planet gears and then for the ring gear I created a circle slightly bigger than the gear was and extruded that geometry.
I also decided to create an arm to help drive the planet gears so it would be easier to use once printed. This consisted of five extensions with pegs on the end to place in the holes of the planet gears. At the same time I realized the gears would fall out really easily so I added a little lip to one side of the ring to keep it from falling out.
I thought I would add a bit of a challenge so I decided to simulate the motion using joints. Since all the components are the the correct places I could use as-built joints to make my life easier. I linked the sun to the ring and then the planets to the arm finally making the arm spin with the sun with a gear ratio of 3. I then linked all the joints together with a couple equations ( I did have to look these up ) to create a smooth motion.
Mr. L suggested I look into making cycloidal gears. These are used to reduce output speed generating a lot of torque and making them super strong.
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