13.6 - Conclusion and Future Work

Conclusion

For our project, we were destined to created a glass cleaner mechanism that would clean a surface with one motion. We were able to complete this mechanism and achieve the purpose of it. We were able to accomplish our main goal which was to cover a certain area and get the squeegee head to rotate in sync with the geared five bar that created the figure 8 motion. We were able to learn a lot from our mechanism, for example, we learned that when 3D printing a base, we have to think about what the weight distribution will be.  We printed a base that when fully assembled would tilt forward because of the weight at the top of the geared five bar. We also learned that after putting together our mechanism, we had an issue with the servo motor's wires getting caught in the gears because they were loose and moving around too close to the contact point of the gears. Lastly, we learned that zip ties make a great last resort to hold our servo motor in place and get some wires out of the way. 

Future Work Ideas:

 After learning from our mistakes, we are able to say that we could potentially take this mechanism to the next level. There are several ways to improve our design and some of them include creating a more stable base, adding a wall behind the gears, and implementing or running the wires inside of the link. All of these ideas would make our design top notch. The first idea, creating a more stable base, would make our overall design look better, because during our demo we used an iPad to hold down the mechanism. The next idea would be to add a wall between the gears and the electronics which would clearly isolate the wires from coming near the contact point of the gears. The last idea would potentially solve the same issue of the wires being caught by the gears, which is to implement the wires of the servo motor inside of one of the links. This idea was actually presented to us by Dr. Symmank. Having the wires run through the link would mean that they come out the back end of the gear, where all the electronics are. 

Acknowledgements: 

We would like to give our thanks to our teaching assistants, Connor and Aayush. They were always willing to help and give us more ideas on how to continue with our design. Another big thanks to our professor, Dr. Symmank who was also very helpful in pushing us in the right direction with our mechanism. She made sure that we didn't go over ourselves and make it more complicated.