We noticed that after the pipette tips fall into the ramp, they would not stay in the ramp and would slide out of the ramp. To circumvent this problem, we decided to add a blocker at the end of the ramp instead of making the ramp longer, which would make our prototype unnecessarily long.
We tested the addition of a blocker at the end of the ramp to see the motion of pipette tips falling after one is picked up by a micropipette. We used masking tape and a ruler to simulate our idea.
Using masking tape and a ruler to simulate a blocker at the end of our ramp.
Intending to be able to fit our final prototype in a box, we put our wheel+ramp set-up in a plastic box to envision our idea.
Trying to envision how our prototype would look like in a box.
From this, we decided that the ramp must be shorter in height to match the wheel’s height so that the tips are able to fall from the top of the wheel into a funnel to slide down the ramp. We also decided that the ramp must be long enough to stretch out of the box and into the 3D printer. From this, we tweaked the dimensions of the ramp and decided to print a block to put in between the two ramp slices to fix the width of the gap between the ramp slices.
3D printing our new ramp.