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For the final mechanism, most of the gears were laser-cut out of 3mm thick acrylic, with a few gears made laser-cut with 3mm thick plywood. I chose these materials since they were easily accessible for free at Texas InventionWorks, and I decided on using acrylic for the majority of the mechanism since it doesn't splinter like plywood does when machined (although cracking turned out to be a slight concern later on). The gears and linkage were fixed to a 1ft x 1ft piece of acrylic for structural rigidity using M3 bolts and nuts, since they were also accessible and easy to use. To solve the issue of the platter not spinning slow enough, a second stepper motor was used to drive the platter in the final mechanism. Although this does not align with the initial project goal of creating a 1-DoF mechanism, it enabled far more customization and simplified the building process significantly.
