Weekly Progress

We assembled the stepper motors controlling the rotation of the refeeders to the holders we 3D printed on Tuesday. This made us realise that the holders were too small, so we widened the dimensions of the holes in our design and printed our new design to try again.

To hold the stepper motors that are controlling the rotation of the refeeders close to the wheel, we designed holders for them. Small holes are built into the design to allow us to secure the stepper motor to the holder with screws. 3D model of the stands we made to hold the refeeders on both … Continue reading Motor holders (Part I)

To ensure that the refeeders are not continuously rotating and only rotates backwards to feed the pipette tips back into the wheel when necessary, we figured out how to add a delay time into the arduino code for the refeeders. We also assembled the two retorts stands that would eventually hold our wheel and funnel … Continue reading Retort stands

We figured out how to control both refeeders so that they are rotating at the same time and speed. We also figured out the movement of the 3D printer and the micropipette, from the moment the micropipette picks up the pipette tip from the ramp to the ejection of the pipette tip into an empty … Continue reading Controlling both refeeders, 3D printer movement

We tested the new refeeder we printed on 02/09 and it somewhat works.

We fixed the pipette holder to the Z-axis sliding table and a stepper motor and tested if a pipette tip could be ejected from the micropipette using this mechanism. It worked! Yuki fixing the pipette holder. With it working, we could finally attach this to the 3D printer. We attached the micropipette + Z-axis sliding … Continue reading Fixing the Z-axis slider to the 3D printer

We tested the pieces we printed on 21/08. We found that the dimensions for the refeeder somewhat work, but we needed a way to attach the refeeder to the stepper motor that would control its rotation. Hence, we redesigned the refeeder to have a protrusion on its side that would allow us to connect it … Continue reading The refeeders need to connect to stepper motors

Since refeeding the wheel with tips has been our biggest problem thus far, we came up with an idea to dump tips back into the wheel. The idea was that we would design and print a block that would catch all the stray pipette tips that fly out of the wheel or off the ramp … Continue reading Birth of the refeeders

Progress check day! You can find our slides at this link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-rBmlqIA3VzK15CogGcvAaiNTKQonxXfwaZx1kbSh54/edit?usp=sharing 

We put the ramp attached to the blocker and the 3D printer frame against the wheel. We then put in some pipette tips into the wheel and rotated the wheel using the DC motor. We achieved remarkably successful results, with many tips sliding into the ramp in the correct orientation as desired. Success is sweet. … Continue reading Wheel + Funnel + Ramp