The class project from 1999 to 2006 was the design, fabrication, programming, and testing of machines to produce wooden six-piece burr puzzles. The raw material is wooden blocks of 0.75"x0.75"x2.25" size, and the machine will cut slots in one or two faces of each block as they are fed into the machine. After producing the six pieces needed for one complete puzzle, the machine starts the cycle over for the next puzzle.
In 2007 a new class project was started. The goal now was to produce an automation system for the assembly of brushless DC motors of the type used to power R/C airplanes. The 2007 and 2008 classes designed, fabricated, programmed, and tested machines to wind three phases on 22.7mm stator cores for these motors.
Winding motor stators proved to be an extremely difficult challenge in the lab, so a new project was selected for 2009. This year we fabricated aluminum bodies for high power LED flashlights on our Mori Seiki Duraturn CNC lathe, and then built assembly machines to assemble complete flashlights. The components of the flashlights were nose piece, o-ring, lens, LED/heatsink module, magnet ring, battery, and tail piece. In 2010, two Motoman MH5L assembly robots were added to the lab, and two teams are using them in the flashlight assembly automation system. One team is using pneumatics and a Cartesian robot for assembling the flashlights. 2011 and 2012 saw the introduction of the experimental Racetrack assembly system.
After a good run manufacturing flashlights, we have moved to a new project in 2013. Intellipaper has requested that we design systems for testing their USB-enabled paper cards. Teams built testing machines that would stack cards on either a good or bad stack based on the decision of a small microprocessor circuit connected to a probe head.
In 2014, we started producing ball-bearing yo-yo's for the class project. One Drop Yoyos was kind enough to give us some cross-sectional drawings of older yoyo models, and we used those as a starting point for a simple "mini" yoyo design that we could fabricate with our CNC equipment. After producing aluminum yoyo pieces, the student teams designed and built automated yoyo assembly machines.
We had a large class in spring 2015, so had two projects. Three teams worked on respooling 3d printer filament from large master spools to little mini-spools. Mini-spool handling needed to be automatic. The second project was automating the assembly of iPhone 5 gear cases using the Yaskawa Motoman MH5L industrial robot.
The class was moved to fall during the 2015/2016 school year. Four teams worked on blending systems for plastic pellets used to extrude 3d printer filament. Three teams used Automation Direct PLC's for control of their blenders, and one team used LinuxCNC as the controller. Measuring pellet ratios by mass required interfacing sensitive load cells to the controllers, which introduced an analog input requirement we haven't had in previous projects.
DMG Mori Seiki Manufacturing donated an NVX-5080 vertical machining center, which will form the centerpiece of the lab, but was still being set up most of the quarter. The 2016 class will make extensive use of both the new NVX and the older Mori Seiki Duraturn CNC lathe.
Four teams worked on the assembly of headlamps in 2016, somewhat reminicent of the flashlight projects of 2009-2012. We intended to have cases for the headlamp injection molded, but designing the molds took too long, so we ended up using 3D printed cases. Perhaps next year we can use injection molded components. Assembly systems included Yaskawa Motoman MH5L robots, AutomationDirect DL06 PLC's, open-source Machinekit CNC running on BBB computers, and various pneumatic and electric actuators.