Week 8: Gearing Up and Down!
Sumin S -
Hey guys! Welcome back to my Senior Project blog. It’s already Week 8, can you believe it?! Time has flown by so quickly, and we only have two weeks left to complete our Senior Project!
For this week, I dedicated most of my time to studying the gear mechanism, and let me tell you, it was quite the learning curve as well as very rewarding! As I mentioned in my last blog, I decided to use a rack and pinion gear mechanism for my microscope bracket design. If you’re not familiar with this mechanism (don’t worry, I wasn’t at first either!), it basically consists of two parts: a circular gear called the pinion and a flat, toothed bar called the rack. When the pinion rotates, it moves the rack in a straight line. This setup is perfect for converting rotational motion into smooth, linear motion, which is exactly what I needed for adjusting the height of the microscope camera!
To fully understand how this mechanism works, I decided to dig in more about it, especially for the microscope. I watched YouTube videos, since it allows me to visualize my design before I began to draw it on OnShape, read mechanical design articles, and even browsed through some engineering forums. I also looked at existing 3D models online and tried to break them down piece by piece to see how the gears interact. Then, I sketched out a few of my own ideas and even made some simple prototypes using cardboard just to visualize the movement. It was definitely a lot of trial and error, but every small discovery made me more confident in how to approach my own design!
After getting a solid grasp on the concept, I finally applied what I learned and created a microscope bracket using the rack and pinion mechanism! The part where it is indicated with color orange is where the camera will be held. I’m especially proud of how this turned out because it allows us to vertically adjust the camera with precision. This way, we’ll be able to capture a much more accurate and instant result of the sample right after it’s been processed with the spin coater. No more fiddling with manual setups!
That’s all for this week! Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this little deep dive into my gear-filled adventure. Next week, I’ll be printing out the microscope bracket design I made using a 3D printer, so stay tuned to see how it turns out!
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