Author: b230051

We managed to obtain a video of the journey of a pipette tip from its starting position in the ramp all the way into the pipette tip box. (See “Working Principle” for more!)

We dedicated the day to fiddling with the positions of everything again. We tried to get a video of the whole process of moving a pipette tip into the pipette tip box, but failed.

We spent the day fiddling with the positions of everything in the entire set-up, trying to find an optimal position to maximise the number of pipette tips entering the ramp. We also tried to design a new funnel that would extend further into the wheel to catch more pipette tips, which did not end up … Continue reading Integrating everything (Part II)

We tested everything together, and it seems to work. We tweaked the set-up until we found a good placement of the funnel and a good angle of tilt for the refeeders. We also designed a new refeeder that failed to feed pipette tips into the wheel, so we abandoned the idea.

We attached the wheel to a stepper motor connected to the same Arduino MEGA 2560 board as the other 2 stepper motors connected to the refeeders. We tweaked the speed until we minimised the number of pipette tips being flung out of the wheel by centrifugal force instead of staying in the wheel and being … Continue reading Connecting wheel to refeeders using stepper motors

We spent the day trying to find the right position for the refeeder relative to the wheel and the ramp and the funnel, which was a struggle. On the bright side, we finalised the code that would control the movement of the refeeders.

We improved our code that coordinates the movement of the wheel to the refeeders. We wrote it such that it does not use accelStepperMotor library to control the stepper motor for the wheel. We tested the code in the lab, and found that the refeeder and wheel were working somewhat well. 

We changed the motor for the wheel from a DC motor to another stepper motor connected to the RAMPS 1.4 board that also controls the refeeders. We wrote the code for the wheel to stop when the refeeders rotate backwards to feed pipette tips back into the wheel, and for the wheel to continue rotating … Continue reading Linking the refeeders to the wheel via RAMPS 1.4 (Part I)

Our refeeder’s stepper motor holder with the new dimensions finally worked! The motor holder holds the stepper motor attached to the refeeder using a coupler securely.

Upon assembling the stepper motors controlling the rotation of the refeeders to the holders we 3D printed last week, we realised it was too big. Hence, we adjusted the dimensions of our holder again and printed the new design.