11/1/19

Our Preliminary Gantry Plan

Happy November, everyone! I’ve been a bit lax on writing blog posts, but here’s an overview of what I worked on for the last sprint.

One of our goals for the mechanical portion of this project was to have an overall plan for the gantry (the gantry is the frame on which our braille-punching mechanism will sit and move around). Since we’re still at the beginning of our project, we decided that it would be best to prioritize functionality. We decided that our printer would be composed of a 1-axis gantry with a single punching mechanism that would move side-to-side along the gantry. The punching mechanism would move using a belt and pulley attached to the gantry. The punching mechanism would have 14 solenoids spaced equally apart, with each solenoid punching 2 characters (4 dimples maximum). This would give us a final printed sheet with 28 characters in total.

Planning out the gantry was super useful in helping us decide what we’d need to do for the rest of our project timeline. We were able to come up with a parts list after this sprint, which gave us a good idea of what we needed to buy/find/beg for. We’ll likely be using 80/20 (framing material) to build our initial gantry, then purchasing solenoids, rollers, and a belt from the Internet. We’ll also need to machine our own solenoid mount for the punching mechanism and our own punch plate.