Personal Project-Music Box
Independent Project Sophia Vona
Semester 1 Engineering Design 1
OVERVIEW
This is the documentation for my personal project freshman year, semester one. This is the first engineering course I have ever taken, and I have been able to record everything I’ve learned in the process.
Spoiler Alert: Many things went well, while other things went terribly wrong. However, in the end I was able to come up with the final product, a music box, you see to the side, and I hope you enjoy learning about it as much as I enjoyed making it!
Research
In order to make sure this project goes as smoothly as possible, so before starting the project I would have an idea as to what direction I was heading. Below you will find all the work done to prepare for the final outcome of the project:
3 project ideas and potential challenges
Final Project Choice:
Music Box!
The final project will not be quite the same as the original. Instead of designing the entire music box, I would be focusing primarily on the gear system, and the technological component used to control the gears. The part that will pluck out the tune will be ordered beforehand, and I will build around it.
I chose it because after talking with my engineering teachers, we determined that while it still presented many unique challenges for me to work through, it would not be so over complicated that it not achievable for me during the time we have for this project and for my experience level.
The successful project will hopefully allow me to play the music box from a potentiometer that will control the speed of the music that is playing.
While coming up with the project idea, I found this source from Instructables user matthewgamer463 under subsection Workshop, Woodworking and it served loosely as the basis of this project. Link to site:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-Programmable-Mechanical-Music-Box/, which I planned to follow, but as you can see, my project now will have some very fundamental differences. While I will still try to follow this general plan, my design will be automated and will focus more on the extension of gears to play the music than the actual musical component. My design will mostly be designed via Autodesk 360, 3d printed instead of made with wood.
Design Specs:
Final Drawing with Measurements
Instructions to Build
Outline of My Steps with Time Allotted and Materials...
...And the Deadlines for These Steps
How This Plan Actually Worked
When looking back at my project, I have to consider one of two things.
1. Did my plan actually work, and
2. Did I meet the deadlines I set for myself?
When considering number 1, my plan technically worked, but looking closer at it there really are not many specifics to it. When I leave a simple phrase like "Design Gears", it seems quite easy to an outside observer, but really offers me no help when I actually try to design said gears. As this was a step that took me the vast majority of the project, looking back making it a bit more specific would have helped me vastly in the long run. Which leads me to my second point about deadlines. I assumed, for some reason, that none of these steps would take me very long at all. The longest time period I allotted for, in this plan, was only 2-3 class periods. These deadlines were not met, as I did not set realistic expectations for any of the setbacks that would inevitably ensue.
For a more detailed list of the steps, including more information about the time it actually took, and the tools/materials needed, take a look at this spreadsheet.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XcV-oXVEmqr46sLjfcGqAnDjIy_pJHH_PfDaEhHkxC0/edit?usp=sharing
Setbacks and Problems
Throughout this project, I faced quite a number of setbacks, and for the most part, I was able to overcome them.
Setback #1
The first setback I suffered came when I was editing the gears but suddenly realized that there were two things wrong with my design.
The first issue was that in my Autodesk Fusion File for the gears and gear base, I had chosen the wrong type of gear for what I needed it to do, and I had been designing objects that were not scaled correctly to my project. This meant that not only was the work I had done to edit the gears rendered useless because I used the wrong gear model, but it also meant that I had to completely discard all the work I had done so far because I could not resize it to fit a new type of gear.
Thankfully, I discovered both of these problems at the same time- around 12/1, and was able to redo what I had lost in a much mroe effective manner.
(Original Design for Bevel gear base)
(Wrong gear)
Comparison Between Gears
(Correct Gear, Bevel Gear)
Setback #2
Even after I had completely fixed all the problems with my gear design, when I went to print them out my first gear, which was meant to attach to the servo, had come out the wrong. Before trying to reprint it, I realized my issue was that the design I made that was supposed to connect it to an extension of the servo was physically too small to be printed.
However, I was able to use the drill press to cut out a different kind of hole for the gear, and screw the gear into the extension. It actually ended up being quite a lot stronger because of this.
Also, there was a brief period where something on my gear base did not actually fit in with this gear, as I had not left much wiggle room and having the extension on the outside rather than the inside, along with the screws, was a little too tight for it to work. However, I was able to saw that part off and hot glue a new piece in.
Gear #1 with extension of servo screwed into it via drill press
Setback #3
Setback #3, unfortunately, occurred to morning that the project was due. I had finally connected everything, I had aligned all the gears, and the very night before I was able to hot glue some things in to ensure none of the gears would shift their position. When I went to take a video of the box in action, suddenly, one gear fell off, and the other was simply too wobbly to consistently spin the music box.
I attempted to remove all the pieces and redo what I had done last night, but I was never able to get it back to the perfect position to be able to use it. Fortunately It is still playable, but you have to be incredibly smooth with your motions and often have to adjust the gears after every couple of tries. To be quite frank, after all the time I spent on this I was so upset when this happened. I am still not sure if the glue just hadn't fully dried, or if something happened to the music box that I missed, but I unfortunately was unable to fix it in the time we had before school ended. I was unable to overcome this setback before the due date.
(Gear falling off as I try to turn potentiometer)
Overview of Project:
Arduino connected to potentiometer and servo motor
Link to original design in tinkercad:
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/70GCRbalpbA-music-box-servo-control
Code and design found at
LINK: https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-How-to-Control-Servo-Motor-With-Potentiome/
Note: My teacher and I changed the setup of the wires a bit to make it neater, however either setup works perfectly fine
Credits to Matthew Marcus for writing the song for my music box.
This project was inspired by Instructables user matthewgamer463, his work gave me the idea and served as the basis of this project. Link to site: https://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-Programmable-Mechanical-Music-Box/