6-Conclusion and Future works

Lessons Learned

We came across a lot of troubles in the manufacturing. Following are some of the lessons that we learned from the project:

Building Solidworks model is really helpful before actually manufacturing the model. We should always follow this procedure, but a working model could not guarantee a working prototype. The model could not account for the inaccuracy of manufacturing and the friction in the model.
When building the model, besides checking the mechanism is working or not, we should also take the assembling and disassembling processes into consideration. For our project, it was very hard to assemble the last few parts because of the spacing issue. Since we used around 100 screws in total, it takes a lot of time to detach the whole design and attach it back again.
Laser cutter and 3D printer could both provide some manufacturing error. In the designing procedure, it is better to make the system have enough tolerance of the errors.
3D structure is always hard to build, sometimes tiny inaccuracy could make the whole system fail to work.
When building complicate systems, it is better to break it into several subsystems and check each design and finally assemble everything together.
Manufacturing and assembling have a lot of tricks, it is better to take time and think out the best way to finish a task before start working on it.

If we had more time, we could have made a better structure to make the castle less wobbly while in motion. As the other end of lead screw is free, it is causing the whole assembly to wobble.
More iterations on the manufacturing of the four-bar mechanism can be done to make them perfectly synchronized with the lifting motion
Make the system assembly easier
Make the castle prettier.