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Purpose: to design a mechanism that can draw a picture of my son.
I uploaded a picture to SolidWorks and used splines to draw my son's face in one continuous loop.
The kinematic mechanism uses two cam inputs to create one position output for the pencil attached at the top right.
Mapping the drawing to the cam shape turned out to be more complicated than I had expected. The drawing on the left is what was actually drawn by this mechanism.
I learned a lot about cam design through this design process and will revisit it again in the near future.
Things to consider for the next iteration:
The drawing has to complete a loop with the same frequency that the cams rotate.
The cam follower doesn't interface with the cam at the same point on the follower as it moves.
Both cams need to be mapped at the same time to produce the correct output.
Consider modeling the entire structure in CAD to design the cams.
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