Rotary to Linear Motion - HW2 9/22/15

First, I found an image online that had the rotary gear and the linear gear. However, it was in .png format which didn't allow me to change the color of it. I had to "trace and expand" in illustrator in order to trace out all the points. I then changed the color to RGB (255, 0, 0), which is the exact red that the laser cut software requires. I also found out later that the software requires a stroke of 0.001 pt or it will not render the cut. Additionally, I had to make sure the fill was null (not white or black), or else the laser cut software would also reject it. 

The hours of the Citris Invention Lab and Jacobs Hall really threw me off. I thought the Invention Lab was open 8am-5pm. Turns out it's only open when there are lab hours (posted on their website). That was pretty inconvenient as I showed up on a Thursday afternoon and it was closed. I went by the following Tuesday during a 30 minute break to swipe some scrap wood from the dumpster. I heard that Jacobs Hall was open 8:30am - 11pm, which was much better. Of course, when I dropped by at 7pm, I learned that while the studio was open until 11pm, the laser cutting room was only open until 7pm! Rejected again.

I wasn't sure how I would obtain the wooden dowel to hold the gear in place, and I didn't know where to buy wooden skewers. On the cold evening after I was rejected from the Jacobs laser cutting room because it had just turned 7pm, I decided to go to the Northside Asian Ghetto for some hot beef noodle soup. Coincidentally, they provided round wooden chopsticks there! Perfect. I quickly grabbed four pairs of chopsticks as I walked out, and they didn't mind at all. They were a nice 0.5cm (5mm) in diameter. Score!

I couldn't even login to the computer at the Jacobs Hall laser cutting machine at first, because it turns out I needed to synchronize my CalNet passphrase using this link: https://net-auth.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/krbaws-v3. I also had to change my password because it didn't meet the new requirements as of July 1, 2014 to not match any words in their given dictionary. 

Of course, I still had Illustrator CS6 installed on my laptop from last year, and although I had installed Adobe Creative Cloud 2015, I didn't install Illustrator CC 2015 -- two different things! The laser cutting software did not properly import svg's from CS6 -- it didn't render some of the lines I made. Therefore, I had to chat with the Adobe help customer service and share my screen with them in order to figure out how to install CC 2015. 

Cutting the wooden dowel was another issue. There was no saw at the studio, only x-acto knives. However, I learned that cutting a 0.5cm chopstick is no joke! I was only able to score it and then had to break it by hand. Quite difficult/dangerous and not fun. 

Hot Glue PROS: dries fast, doesn't stick to wooden tables, malleable in the beginning

Hot Glue CONS: dries fast, actually hot to the touch in the beginning, quite voluminous (so you have to make sure to account for that in the cutting), causes friction if it's sticking out, squeezes out quite rapidly and can be hard to control (you only need a tiny swipe of it to be sticky!). Because it dries quite quickly, i would recommend using tape to stick the wood together when possible in order to test whether the fixture will work before permanently fixing it with the hot glue. 

At first, I glued the knobs underneath the linear gear too wide apart and too tight against the linear gear, so the gear got stuck. This is how I learned to test first with tape before using the hot glue. I decided to flip the board over and try again with the other side. The second time around, I gave it more "breathing room" -- about 0.2cm buffer room to slide, and it was much smoother.

What I would change for next time: Add stoppers at the ends of the linear gear so that it would stop when reaching the circular knobs. If the stoppers were long enough, it could also add an additional mode of control.