Week fourteen: machines that make

Actuating motors

This week we worked in groups to make a machine that can make a thing. We followed the instructions provided by Nadya Peek to assemble four chassis and a motor control board. Our group aimed at making a machine that actuated a moving hot glue gun for assembly or art in three dimensions!

My contribution to this week was assembling some of the cables and connecting the motor boards and making sure that all of our hardware was ready to be programmed. Assembling the cables was supposed to be an easy task, but I messed it up because of the tricky wiring on one of the cables. Luckily, Ariel and Nadya came to my rescue and we got everything up and running. My recommendation for making the cables is to use scissors to split cables rather than ripping them apart.

Look at those cables!

Since I was in charge of the wires, I also put together the boards and tested it on the motors. The green boards that connect to motors are really black. The power supply is like a computer power supply with a 2x2 header soldered to the end. Just make sure to connect the power supply to the wall/extension cord after you connect all other wires! To run it, follow the instructions on Github! I ran fabnet_axesxy.py which is in pygestalt/examples/machines/mods