I put together this presentation on intake and arm linkage design for the Chicago Robotics Alliance workshop this weekend hosted by the 1781 (thanks to them for putting on a great event). I thought it might be useful to other teams if I shared it here as well.
It’s written to be a reference while your CADing / trying to design something so you’re not missing much by not hearing me talk through it, but if you have questions or think of a cool robot that has a linkage I should include in the future let me know. Happy to make more gifs.
Very nice and well put together presentation Mike.
Here is the linkage design software I use. It is a little clunky here and there but nice and light weight, easy to install, no licensing, easier to play with than traditional CAD. Overall a great tool for those not familiar with CAD and for working in 2d.
Thank you Mike for sharing this informative presentation. I got lots of benefits from it.
I have one question for you in the single pivot intake why you make two line for the piston stroke length in this schematic? Why you just draw the two extreme position of the piston with the length of its two point of fixation in both is that related to the spreadsheet you made so you can iterate the piston stroke easily during the design process? Thanks in advance
Setting it up with the two and three lines you can iterate both stroke and cylinder bore by changing one dimension and both positions will update. This does a few helpful things
Makes it harder to change the wrong dimension or to forget to change a dimension
Decreases likelihood the sketch becomes unsolvable when you change one length but not the other or that your linkage gets in a different orientation / stuff generally moves around
Less work to iterate
This is a trick I picked up from Adam’s 973 RAMP video which I believe is also linked.
This was not recorded when I initially presented it. I don’t have plans to present again anytime soon, but if I do I’ll try to record it.
That being said, there’s not a lot of added value in a recording of the presentation vs the content on the slides, it’s really something you need to learn by doing vs just hearing about it.
in the force analysis related to pneumatically actuated single pivot intake, why you didn’t multiply the extension and retraction force by two as every intake always incorporate two pneumatic pistons ?
Good catch. This started out as an arm example so I used one cylinder and when I redrew it I just plugged in numbers and didn’t think about 2 cylinders per intake. I’ll add a note about this.
