Zach Arnold

Zsarnold headshot.jpg

About Me

Zach Arnold is currently a third-year Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Tech and upholding a position as the Enterprise president. He is interested in controls, 3D printing, and other manufacturing techniques and methods. His previous project was the GM automation cage and currently is working on the Lasersaur and other miscellaneous projects to benefit the team.

Interests

  • Electronics
  • Open source
  • 3D Printers
  • Robotics
  • Automation
  • VLSI
  • PLC

Experience

  • I have built 4 separate 3D printers from a kit. Two deltas, cloner(MakerBot clone), and a Prusa i3 clone.



Enterprise

Semester 1 Fall 2017


GM Robot Arm Automation:

    This semester Dan and I worked on a project to automate a 3D printer. The main aspect of the automation is an open source robotic arm called Dexter. After 2.5 months, we were able to complete the mechanical part of the arm after jumping many obstacles. We did not receive the electronics until a much later date. Upon obtaining the package of the electronics, we noticed that more parts were missing which is going to set back our timeline once again. Another part of the project is the safety cage that Dan designed. The cage is going to be the main showcase for the automation system where the robotic arm and the printer can work without the risk of injury. The last aspect of the project that I worked on was increasing the ease of removal of prints from the print bed. I designed in CAD and started to print a fan cooling system that, in theory, should speed cool the print bed of the Prusa i3 Mk2 allowing the part to pop off. Our plans for next semester(Spring 2018) is to get the arm moving and programmed, start wiring up the cage with lights and a display system and, lastly, to get prints off the bed easier. All of this should lead to a working demo for design expo.

Semester 2 Spring 2018


GM Robot Arm Automation:

   This semester Dan, Erica and I worked on the next part of the automation of a 3D printer. I was tasked with learning how to program the arm, wiring the arm, getting Octoprint on a raspberry pi, and creating an Arduino circuit to have the RGB LEDs working on the cage. The RGB circuit was created with old MOSFETs from broken Ramps boards and some pulldown resistors. The board will then connect to the digital pins 9,10,11 on an Arduino mega. Whenever the button is pressed, it cycles between the 6 presets: random red, random green, random blue, strobing random RGB, white and lastly purple. After a couple of long zoom conferences with Haddington Dynamics, we were able to get Dexter moving and completely wired. The wiring was a long task since we had to make sure that the wires did not get strained or pulled within all of Dexter's degrees of freedom. The bulk of the programming was fairly simple with just the angles being changed. The goal for next semester (Fall 2018) is to figure out external feedback from the printer to the robot, add some sort of force sensing with the end effector, and lastly start to allow any size prints. These plans should be a good step in the correct direction to get a fully autonomous 3D printing system. Images - https://imgur.com/a/42GDrtg Video - https://drive.google.com/a/mtu.edu/file/d/134raRGVk7CO-c5Ff2POeP2raITlLMOgD

Semester 3 Fall 2018


Lasersaur:

   This semester I worked to get the Lasersaur back in working order. I had to redesign all of the mirror mounting methods. This proved to be slightly difficult because I had to make it fit the original 3D printed pieces that were designed previously but the files for it could not be found. I had to reverse engineer the dimensions to get mounting points. I also had to do some updating to all of the wiring and firmware. The Lasersaur is using a smoothieboard with smoothieware being the firmware. The firmware was the CNC version of smoothieware with the laser being enabled. I had to change some of the working size dimensions and the steps per mm to get it more dimensionally accurate. The next steps are to redesign the gantry due to a random binding issue and to wire all of the endstops correctly.

3D Print Service:

   This semester I continued the enterprise printing service. I printed a few different things for the ME department and Materials department. At the beginning of the semester, I designed a keychain that we can give out at different events. I went through multiple iterations to make it be the most streamlined, print in 30 minutes, and to fit well in a pocket.

Miscellaneous:

   This semester I completed a lot of outreach and increased the team size of the enterprise. At the beginning of the semester we only had twelve members and now we have twenty members.
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