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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 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 wanted would like to give our thanks to our wonderful teaching assistantassistants, Connor . He was such a great help to our team and project. 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.