July 2019 – ettis.at

2019-07-202019-11-09

Programming a spiral

As I wrote in my previous post, I decided to program a Custom Shape Generator in Tinkercad in order to be able to generate every detail of my bowl feeder just as I want it to be. I spent my two weeks summer vacation in Italy thinking about sine and cosine, vectors and loops. I implemented the JavaScript code on my cellphone, although characters such as the square brackets [] were a challenge and I needed to install a special Android keyboard app for these. When coming back from Italy it was almost finished, only a few minor details needed to be fixed.

2019-07-042019-11-09

Designing a Bowl Feeder

Bowl Feeders are used very often in industry when a bulk load of pieces must be separated into single pieces. They consist of a bowl with a spiral ramp on the inside. The bowl is vibrated around its center in a way that each point of the ramp vibrates horizontally and vertically, e.g. in a small circle. This will cause parts on the ramp to be thrown forward a little on each vibration.

Each bowl feeder must be made specifically for the goods it should process, mainly for the pieces’ physical dimensions. This is the reason why I want to 3d-print my bowl. 3d-printing is quick and if a tiny detail doesn’t fit, I can cheaply make a new one.