mahd/initial_design/exploration/design_space_exploration.md

Design space exploration

Introduction

This document is a summary of the design space exploration. We are looking for ideas that can help us in our design of the whiteboard writer. This is looking for existing projects but also for different types of plotters.

We are just searching on the internet. The summary is found in the next section.

Exploring

Image search

Searching for whiteboard writer robot gives the following ideas:

• iboardbot (kickstarter) Plotter type robot. With Cartesian axis. But can also done with a different axis like this, which shows some nice solution for the cabling.
• Scribit (kickstarter) Kiting plotter robot. Suspended with two wires. Also this simple example, which clearly shows some design issues.
• Robot Portrait (youtube) Polar axis plotter robot.
• Robot Clock Simple clock with scissor arms.
• Doodle Clock (youtube) Articulating arm. With a lifting boom and rotation arm/link

Observation.

All systems are slow. Most have the problem of being ‘heavy’ and moving the arm quite some distance. The interesting one is definitely the kiting robot. It can be easily constructed but has still some design issues. It has de tendency to swing. Light models are quicker but in that case the oscillation of suspension wire becomes more dominant.