BLOG entry 4

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 HeLLO everybody!! Welcome welcome to my most EGG-citing blog ever!

This blog will be a summary of my very VERY cool design for the egg drop challenge. With that I’ll walk you all through our thinking process and the final outcome.

🥚🥚🥚 EGG-DROP CHALLENGE🥚🥚🥚

Background information: through learning ICPD module you may remember we have use and designed on fusion 360. So from the designing of this app, we are able to transfer our design via a specific file to another app that I will introduce e later. After some quick and easy settings, we can PRINT🖨 IT OUT! PHYSICALLY! IN REAL LIFE!

So what exactly is egg-drop challenge we are tasked to do you may wonder… 

With the knowledge of how to create set with our design, we have to not a complete rip off.

💣 IDEATION💣

After being briefed on this challenge my teammate and I immediately went to research on successful egg

drop challenges on YouTube and Google. After observing countless designs and their working principle, we found a very interesting design which is the ignition for my interest in this project. It was a bomb. It was A BOMB! A bomb designed 3D print dropping of the sky like re-enacting the bombs dropped by fighter jets. This design just made 3D printing much more interesting. With that, my teammate Jun Kai started with some 

✍️ sketching✍️ of the bomb design that we replicated from the sources online. This short video was the spark to our very own rocket design: rocket design 

This was really an interesting discovery as the rocket was able to survive a crazy 9.5m drop, almost ten times our required height!!

Although the first design was awesome we wanted MORE. We wanted to make a hybrid that will absolutely protect the egg, so while measuring the dimensions and calculating the egg size Jun Kai was also slowly putting together the pieces of 3D print required to produce or ‘egg-bomb’ or so that’s what we called it😀. Meanwhile, the curious me went for more research on other designs that we can integrate into our all powerful egg-bomb. Subsequently, I was able to find the use of springs and an egg capsule for additional protection shown below.

Purpose and sketches

Initially the design would be a rocket was with a fin, a pit, a dual spring system, an egg capsule and the main body. The purpose of each part will be explained below.

1st draft🗒

 Fins: Installed to increase the body’s stabilization ability in air. 

Egg capsule: Decrease space for quail egg to move hence, it lessen movement of the quail egg.

Body: The bottom of the body is heavy and bigger. This helps maintain that the bigger surface area part of the design touch the ground on first impact using the principle of pressure=force/area.

Dual spring system: The bigger diameter spring is higher in stiffness compared to inner spring. This is because the outer spring acts as a support as well as spring. The inner spring is a full spring that helps in absorbing energy. This Dual spring also uses the principle of pressure=force/area as the area is spread across the bottom of the egg capsule.

Pit: The negatively extruded tunnel acts as a pit to hold the spring and egg capsule in place.

2nd draft📓

 

This draft was made shortly after the first as we realized we will be dropping it from 2 meters. The fins design would have a very low impact on our overall design as the heavy bottom is fully capable in ensuring that the tip of the base will hit the ground first. Therefore we switched the tail of the bomb to a blade.

Blade: The big surface area helps increase air resistance(air drag) and it decreases the speed at which the egg is falling.  

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A formula that can be applied is Newton's Second Law of Motion.

=> F=mA - air resistance

From that we can also find air resistance with

=>FD = 1/2 𝞺v^2CDA

          = 1/2・(density)・(velocity)^2 ・(Drag Coefficient)・(Cross-sectional Area)

Therefore in order to increase the amount of air drag (FD) we can either increase the cross-sectional area. Since my original plan was to make an egg-bomb, we could not change the drag coefficient as it will change our design so we opted to change the cross sectional area.

🥚Quail egglets🥚

We decided to buy the eggs and researched on the weakest part of the egg.

Firstly after we bought the eggs we measured the dimensions and size as well as compared it to others who bought the eggs.

We measured the eggs to be 34mm in height and 27mm in diameter. Therefore we gave a +-3mm allowance for our egg capsule in order to fit bigger sized eggs.

We also did some research on the most vulnerable part of the egg which is the side.

However there is a strong part of the egg which is the top and bottom. This unsqueezable part made us realize that we should rotate the egg in a way that it is held vertically.
With this crucial information we made the interior of our egg capsule slightly arc-shaped using (centre-point-arc) like an egg such that the shock from the drop is spread evenly throughout the egg bottom.

The egg capsule that we created can be seen below with the use of a technique called revolve in fusion. 

Fusion 360

After these sketches we started our fusion 360 journey and we had a total of 5 parts which is a big difference compared to other groups. First my job was to create a bomb like shell for the main body which coincidentally looks like an egg :o

The egg capsules

This is the blade design I specifically created with my heart and soul. It involves a ring with 3 blades protruding from it. 

This is the spring that the egg capsule rested on

This is the main part of the design the egg like structure I made!

With us feeling extremely accomplished with the finshed design of all the parts needed to assemble the object, we head over to W319 to start our 3D printing

3D printing!!

(STL file)

And finally there it is, when imagination becomes reality… Hold up just a few more step to get there.

After the design, 1️⃣ complete the sketch you are doing. 2️⃣select a body that you want to print and right click on it. 3️⃣Pressing the add to mesh will make this panel pop up and 4️⃣you have to change from the 3MF setting to the STL(binary) one. After that 5️⃣ rename and save it to your desired location and change to our new app CURA.

Ultimaker CURA

(Gcode file)

1️⃣Download Ultimaker CURA on your prefered browser. As you enter this app, 2️⃣click the top left hand side to open types of 3D printing machine. For me I got my hands on the Creality ender 3 and Ultimaker s3 hence you can see I have chosen them. (For troubleshoot) If your printer is not seen in the selection you have to add it by typing it in yourself. 3️⃣You can click on the object you want to print and click either the moving button or the rotating button on the left hand side to adjust it however you like. 4️⃣ To access the settings for you 3D printer, click on this settings button and adjusting for example the density of your produce or the supporting material placement(circle it). 5️⃣ When your adjustments are done, click on save changes and then click on the blue rectangle at the bottom right of the screen ‘slice’ to find the approximate time needed to print out your design. Lastly, 6️⃣you may save this Gcode file to an SD card or USB flash drive (thumb drive).

Turning on the machine

Loading of filament

loading filament may be a little tricky. Firstly make sure the PLA filament is free from any obstruction so that the filament can be fed into the printer smoothly. After that to insert the filament you have to turn the blue knob anti-clockwise and that's it!

SD card

 A very important step to view your file! please don't forget :)

Printing

Before printing we should always change the settings or press tune. By scrolling the black knob and click it we can adjust out settings with ease. Firstly, always start with a printing speed of 100. Set the nozzle temperature to 200. Get the bed temperature to 50 and fan speed to 255 for faster cooling. after this you may press print.

Slowly adjust the print speed to 200 with an addition of +20 speed every 10 minutes interval.

Removing print

After printing... PLEASE WAIT for at least 10 minutes for the board as well as the product to cool down so as to not hurt your product and yourself. Then scrape object with a plastic scraper slowly.

Removing excess material and support should be done carefully to reduce damage on your actual product. A video of me showing slow but progressive movement.

Shut down of machine

This last part is to save the earths limited supply of electricity. Make sure you do!

Turn off the printer using the knob and then press the switch on beside the electricity plug.

THE EGG DROP

First let me show you how our design is put together!

Step 1: Place the spring into the opening of the base

Step 2: Place the bottom of the capsule into the base

Step 3: Place the Egg into on the capsule

Step 4: Close the egg by putting the other side of the capsule on the egg

Step 5: Place the blade on the ledge of the base

Step 6: Use the top to screw the product together

NOW for the EGG DROP

It was a SUCCESS! Man I have never felt happier ever. All the hard work designing, sketching and researching has absolutely paid off.

A video of our very own egg drop: Successful run of egg drop challenge

To show that the egg was raw I made a video teaching you how to make scramble eggs inspired by howtobasic on youtube😀shown below

💭Learning reflections💭

At the start of the practical I was enthusiastic and pictured many great ideas. However many of these versions are incomplete, many sketching and measurements, details and design have failed. I realize there was much more to this challenge than just building a piece to protect an egg from falling, but also about finding out your creativity and learning more about yourself. Sleeping late at night and waking up very early in the morning to secure a 3D printer for my group made me somewhat insane. Believe it or not even when I’m sleeping, designs and ideas continue popping out of my head yelling for me to get up and switch up a design making sure it is nice, compact, sleek and the best it could ever be.

 I learnt many valuable lessons throughout this challenge, first being that I am a rookie at 3D printing and it seriously takes experience and innovation to make efficient use of not just the materials but also the product. This is due to all the drafts we have made, and failed due to 3D printing error as well as the competitiveness in this challenge. This leads me to my second point, competitiveness. Having only around 9 3D printers, some better than the others, made printing really hard in the w319. Waking up and reaching school as early as 6.15am made me seriously rethink my dedication to this challenge and understand myself more. Taking away my sleep and brain cells I took risk coming so early while knowing there are others like me striving to their best ability to get a hold of a 3D printer made me regain my motivation after each failure attempt.Even after securing a 3D printer it took long hours to print, trapping me in w319 like a prisoner in a jail cell. 

However from this challenge I have more insights on fusion 360 as it was my most use application in the period of two weeks totalling to about 20 hours in total. The potential for. Fusion was incredible and I have to say I was far from learning all of it, but I definitely improve my competency in it by watching relentless hours of videos on YouTube. CURA was also an amazing application in conjunction with fusion they work amazingly together and with a few simple clicks and orientation I am able to print my desired product. I learnt much about infills density and supports physically and found out how important it is to additive manufacturing.

With that I also had many breaking points during the process of this challenge sacrificing my sleep really messed my feelings and emotions up which also made me realise what I had in me. Screwing up over and over again made failure seem absolutely normal to me. Each time I felt like I fell down I had to muster my courage and face my problem by first solving it.

While I was there thoughts scurry through my head as I desperately tried to make the best of what I could. From quickly using the skills I had gained from ICPD lesson to complete file transfer to STL file as well as Gcode file in CURA to loading the filament, heating the nozzle and the bed as well as all the necessary settings for the 3D print. I truly learnt a lot as I thought back, but this was just the start. A few hours later the print was done, to my ‘surprise’ the threading on my 3D prints were a total mess. Not only did it not fit, the threads are just way too thin. Feeling defeated I went on and searched for other ways to use fusion 360 to create a better and more refined body part. Although it was extremely hard for me to get my hands on the printers, the competitiveness of the environment was exactly what I needed, testing myself to my limits. 

I also learnt one other thing which was not to be too ambitious. As a student new to 3D printing, Creating a design with so many part was like a far-fetched dream to reality. Combining them was a painful process which made my team slow down a lot. Therefore in future I would definitely lower down my expectations of myself and others.

Hope this has been a wonderful journey seeing me progress with each and every step I take in this challenge! See You guys soon!!💪