What were the successes and failures, any opportunities that you encountered when working on these final research projects?
As a team, our main failure was probably starting late. If we had started earlier, we might have had a chance to fix some of the problems we saw towards the end (e.g. weak 3D printed parts, difficult with cleaning out the extruder, etc.).
That being said, I think our greatest success was laying down the groundwork for this project. We established a feasible method for extruding icing-like materials that future contributors can build off of.
What were your contributions to the final project?
I contributed to the extrusion reservoir and actuation of the reservoir. Additionally, I created a wiki for documenting our work for future contributors.
What were you able to accomplish in our short amount of time?
We created a working demo of the robot icing a spherical cake! We also began filling the wiki with information about our work.
Where do you feel like this research is going? Is it worthwhile to continue?
Definitely! I think the next step would be developing the translation circuitry for communication between the robot and the Arduino and also making more robust 3D-printed parts.
What did you learn from the process you developed in this class? How might that inform how to develop further projects/ideation/prototypes for you in your field in the future?
I learned that rapid prototyping of physical objects is much more viable than I originally thought. Before this class, my experience with 3D printing mainly consisted of shoddy, old Makerbots with low tolerances. In contrast, working with the Dimensions printers was a godsend—when you designed a part to be a certain dimension, it actually came out at that dimension!
Additionally, as much as I abhor proprietary software, I learned that in many cases it’s more efficient to use a tool you can get a lot done with, rather than the ideal tool. To put it more concretely, I didn’t like that the software backend for the robot used proprietary software such as Rhino and Grasshopper, however, we were able to prototype quickly because everyone on the team know how to use them.
What are you most proud of in this class? (You’ve done a lot! I am certainly proud of you all!)
I’m most proud of the fact that everyone on my team worked together to create a functional demo. Individually, none of us had much experience with building a custom extruder, but through the project we were able to combine our individual expertise to get the extruder working.