7. Conclusions and Future Work (Group 23)

The final prototype of our automatic pizza cutter ended up requiring more motor torque than we had initially hoped. This was due to the amount of friction in the Geneva drive and the slider crank. Individually, the mechanisms worked well, but struggled to operate fully when connected together. One solution to decrease the amount of friction in the Geneva drive would have been to cut the parts using acrylic rather than wood. The components of the Geneva drive were also not mounted on a bearing, causing friction between the base of the prototype and the Geneva drive.

Because we wanted the prototype to be big enough to cut a medium size pizza (12 inch diameter), we ended up with a shortage of shafts to connect parts properly. As a result, we were only able to apply the two bar mechanism for the slider crank to one side of the pizza cutter. Adding another identical two bar mechanism to the other side would have balanced the system and reduced the amount of play in the slider crank, resulting in less motor torque required for system functionality.

In the future, we would cut the Geneva drive using acrylic and mount it using bearings, and we would also properly balance the slider crank to reduce the amount of play in the system. Additionally, the prototype was fairly large and heavy. If we were to produce this and sell it as a product in an actual marketplace, we would make it more practical for the user by decreasing the space between the mechanisms to make it more compact and portable.