This week, once our nut block and screw sets arrived, we reshifted our focus back to the stepper motor slider. We tested it with our motor, and it appeared to work fine, where the nut block was moving as predicted. However, we still had to design a mechanism to hold the top piece, bottom piece, nut block, and actual stepper motor in alignment.

We also figured that we could add the bracket to our nut block by designing a 1cm thick block with 4.5mm holes 3 cm apart from the tip of each circle.

The top and bottom pieces had 5.5mm holes on either side, and the stepper motor had holes that could accommodate M2 screws. However, all these holes were not in alignment. Moreover, the nut block itself was too wide, hence preventing us from slotting one singular 5mm diameter rod through the top and bottom piece. Thus, we tested out an upside-down U shaped contraption of 4mm in diameter, attempting to slot it through the top piece and bottom piece. We also designed another bracket to include side-pieces flanking the nut block with matching 5.5mm holes like the top and bottom piece. We hoped that that would keep all components of our nut block and screw set aligned.

While this sort of worked, our U-shaped contraption quickly snapped in half. While this could be due to the lack of fillet-ing at the corners, we also figured that the rods were simply too tiny to support the force applied by our stepper motor. We plan on brainstorming other ways to support our stepper motor slider.