For the purposes of this project, we wanted to create a mechanism that was both a showcase of the principles we learned within this course and additionally a mechanism with a useful real-life application. Therefore, pairing these two needs, we came up with the idea of an automated onion cutter. The team first gained interest in this idea when we all decided that we were all especially vulnerable to crying and nicking ourselves while cutting onions. Automating the process was the next natural step as it would allow the user to stay a safe distance away from the onion while the whole cutting process is automated.
When perfectly cutting an onion, multiple cuts should be performed with the cutting plane in line with the axis of the onion's core and at equal spacing. This produces much more uniform and tasty onion chunks. A picture of an appropriately sliced onion can be seen below.
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source: https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_chop_an_onion/
To accomplish this goal, our prototype would need to alternate between two functions:
- cut the onion
- move the cutting mechanism to the next cutting angle
With this in mind, we devised the design concept seen in the image below.
This idea hinges on a gearbox (highlighted in yellow) that alternates between two outputs that each complete one rotation before switching to the other. In this way the top output would operate the knife while the bottom would turn a worm gear that would index to the next position.