Week 7, counting the days down to our final presentation. This week I had more prints to make. I made copies of some parts I already had, to have backups. I also printed more spirals because I had to experiment with managing a way to have the spiral and metal rod be tightly fit. At first, I had put a nail to tighten the metal rod and 3d printed resin spiral, but there kept being some slipping since the metal rod has wedges because it is also spiral. I ended up putting glue on the metal rod to slide the resin spiral to stick tightly. This fixed the problem I was facing, which was that the resin spiral was not spinning at all. Now the metal rod and spiral are spinning smoothly.
Apart from 3d print, we also had practice presentations at the end of the week to prepare for the final presentation. I received a lot of good feedback to polish my presentation format and make sure to explain more of my process.
I also spent most of my week calibrating as I said I would at the end of last week’s blog post. Luckily, my peer Angel was nice enough to lend me the scale he is using for his DTSF project. I was able to weigh the average of how much each section of the spiral could hold. Doing this meant filling and refilling the dispenser multiple times with each substance, rice, beans, sugar, and flour. I went back and forth to also weigh the average weight of cups and mL for each substance. This is helpful because I was able to create a mini conversion table in my code. In my code, I implemented several dictionaries in python to associate the substance name with the weight depending on the unit (ex. “beans” = 4.2 decagrams). I also had to do some conversions after weighing everything because Angel and I found out that the scale weighs by decagrams, which seems specific. In finding the average for cups and mL, I had to create some conversion calculations to get other measuring units (ex. grams, oz, liter, pounds, etc.).
