 Hey, what's up, folks? Welcome back to another layer by layer. In today's tutorial, we're going to take a look at the CAD assembly of our Zoetrope. So take a look at the Adafoot Learn system and check out our Zoetrope project. This is a really cool Zoetrope-inspired project that uses the Adafoot Cricket to drive motor and a NeoPixel and a Photo Interruptor sensor to create this really cool edge-lit acrylic animation. So you have this turntable thing, and you have these acrylic panels with some artwork that's engraved on it. Each engraving is a frame from an animation. In this case, it's the party pair animation. And I just wanted to chat about the CAD assembly and show you, folks, how I used the GF gear generator in Fusion Studio 60 to make this kind of cool turntable. So yeah, so check out the guide on the Adafoot Learn system. If you are interested in creating robotic projects or anything motorized, I definitely recommend checking out the Adafoot Cricket. This is the feather wing version. It lets you slap one of these Adafoot feathers on top of this cricket board, and the cricket gives you access to driving all sorts of motors, stepper motors, regular DC motors, and even, I think I said stepper motors, all sorts of types of motors, servos, and digital inputs, so you can do sensors, cap touch, NeoPixel driver, audio, amplifier built-in. It's all the things you need to make a visual cool project, and that's why it made sense to use it in this project, where we are driving a NeoPixel, a motor, and we're taking data from a sensor, which is that photo interrupter. So check that out. Sign up to get notified when they are back in stock, or go ahead and purchase it from DigiKey. I think they have it in stock there. But yeah, a very cool board for doing robotics and other type of projects. All right, so let me show you folks the gear mechanism that's going on here. So this is a way to create kind of a turntable with an internal gear and a double helical gear, and this is not using any ball bearings. It's just using a motor and these two gears, so there's no ball bearings. There's a couple screws and things, but it's really cool to get this vertically mounted up or down, and the only thing holding it in place is the gear. There's a little internal ring that kind of keeps it up, but other than that, there's very little friction, and it's a cool way to kind of create this moving turntable. And that's kind of the essential thing in this project. Another cool thing that I thought was really neat is that the internal gear is removable from the top cover, so the idea is that the top cover is what holds those acrylic panels, so if you wanted to do a different animation, you could just print out a different set of slotted holes and then just fit that internal gear back in there, so that's kind of cool. And here's a look at the inner ring. It has a little groove, and the top cover has a lip, and those two just meet, and the internal channel is what keeps the turntable in place and from flying off of the assembly, so that's kind of how you install it. And again, in motion, when you turn it on, it keeps itself upright because of the lip and the internal groove, there's very little friction, and because the profile of the gear is a helical, double helical, it's able to kind of self-correct itself and state-centered, and here you can see it positioned vertically, and it's able to maintain its balance and all that because the gears are meshing really well to each other. So yeah, that is the thing in motion, so now I'll jump into the CAD assembly, and we can chat about some stuff in Fusion 360. So I'll talk about the structure. This is a big project where the goal of it, I really wanted to create all of the main pieces outside of the assembly and then bring everything in together. So this is my first attempt where I'm like designing the pieces individually and then bringing them all together in this main assembly file, and it was working out pretty good up until I started creating the encoder ring where I kind of broke my own rule and just started designing inside of it, so all this stuff here in the timeline pertain to that one component, and I really wish I had built it externally and then brought it in because that would have made the time a little bit smaller. Another thing that's crazy is the hardware, the screws and the hex nuts, they take up a lot of the timeline. So if you look down here, this thing starts about right here, and then all of this stuff is just adding screws and then applying a joint to that screw. So that's kind of what I typically see when I look at other engineers that are making big projects. Their assembly is just like a bunch of imported things in their timeline. There's nothing actually designed in that, and that's kind of how these type of big projects need to be. So moving forward, I will try to do everything in its own component, and then the main assembly will bring all those components in. So you can see in my data panel, I created a folder just for this project called Zoetrope, and then I tried to build everything in here, so like the gear, the top cover, and everything are built independently, except for, of course, the ring, which I was telling you about. I built it in here, and the main reason was because I just got lazy and I got tired of dealing with edit in place. So edit in place is the next thing I want to talk about. So edit in place is when you bring in an external component, now you have the ability to edit in place. You can see this little pencil icon, that little pencil icon lets you edit your component inside of this assembly. So within there, there's a new kind of thing that I'm starting to learn about, it's called assembly contexts. I have four of them, right, and they kind of safe name themselves numerically. So you have context one, two, three, four, and then you have something called local. So when you're editing something in place, you kind of sometimes you want to reference the things outside. So you can see here everything that's ghosted is a external component that is not inside of the component you're editing. When you're done editing, you click this finish edit in place. And I started to notice that the associative menu is here. If you don't want to create an associative link, you can choose whether you want to have this or not. I just leave it on by default. I think it's fine to keep this here, it hasn't messed with me yet. But let me step through them just to give you an idea of what these context assemblies do. So if I go to the first one, take a look at what happened around me. What I think is what is going on is that I am now viewing what it looked like when I was editing it before I did all these things outside of this component. So every time you're saving and editing in place, Fusion is keeping track of the contextual assembly. What's going on on the outside? So as I'm flipping through this, you can see the progression outside of this component that I'm editing, how everything is changing. And this is just a good way to reference like, oh, I need to move this over there because this component over here is starting to crash into it. So that's why these are here and they're kind of neat. But one of the tips I found that if you're like a lot of times I'll be editing and I can't quite see what I want because these things are in my way and even though they're transparent and ghosted out, it's still kind of hard to get in there and see what's going on. So what you could do is you can highlight and activate the local assembly context and that'll just kind of isolate your component. So that's my main tip when you're editing something in place and you're getting confused, clearing everything out and then just kind of seeing what it is I'm editing. Just click and activate local and that will isolate your component essentially. But if you are having to, you know, reference the things outside of what you're editing, then activating the latest context is the way to go. These also get saved in your timeline, which is interesting, not in this particular timeline, but you'll see once I edit, once I finish editing in place, it'll bring me back to the main assembly and you can see here that in the timeline there are some of these bits here that get saved. So this is where the first context was built. So as you're editing in place, those are being kind of saved as a snapshot in your timeline of your main assembly. It gets pretty hairy. I'm still, you know, this is the first project where I've used it so that's why I'm like stumbling with words trying to explain what the hell it's doing. But essentially it's that you can edit your thing, your component in place and you have the control whether you want to isolate it or see it in context of your assembly. Oh man, it's so hard to to do, but yeah. That's probably one of the reasons why I designed the encoder ring inside of this document as opposed to doing it in an external document. Ha ha. Alright, but to go with that I wanted to chat about how I was able to figure out how to get these two gears to mesh with each other and how to position them in a way where it makes sense. So the way I was able to do it was through the bottom cover, so activate that and basically just figuring out the mounting holes for the for the DC gear here and then placing that with a sketch, placing the holes through a sketch. You can see my profile here has these screws or these mounting holes and I have a sketch dimension that defines like where it is in the center origin. So here you can see it's 8.5 millimeters and that's the position of the mounting holes from the center origin. So if you wanted this to come closer, let's change this to 7. You'll notice that like the feature updates, but nothing else updated and that's because the joint is created on the external component. So what I have to do is I have to hit finish edit in place and now you can see that the joints have all self corrected itself and the motor has shifted where it needs to and so has the gear has shifted where it needs to. So you really you have three joints here that you're working with you have the joint for the actual motor that gets positioned to the bottom cover and then you have the joint for the gear that gets positioned to the shaft of the motor and whenever you change the dimension or the sketch position of your set of mounting holes everything else will cascade and work with it. Now because it is because the sketch is done inside of an external component I have to kind of edit in place every time I want to to modify it. So using a cross-section analysis I could see excuse me where the where the gear is and you can see here this is way too far these gears aren't mating so I would have to go back in here hit edit in place double click the sketch I want to update and hit 8.5 just to get it back at going and then it's not updating you know because I have to actually hit finish edit in place and then the joint for the motor will update and the joint for the gear will update as well and that's kind of where it is. You see it's still not meshing right and that's because I kind of I kind of just faked it you can't I know this works because I printed it but if I wanted to make it really really work I'd have to go in here where the joint was right click drive joint and then I can drive this manually to see like oh okay so around there is where the gear would work probably okay yeah but you can see here I have about a millimeter of clearance between the surfaces that would essentially mate so there's about 0.9 millimeters of clearance or really a millimeter yeah and you can see here that I actually have the the gear in the wrong orientation it's actually supposed to be flipped but again I'm just kind of I know it'll work because like you can kind of get an idea of how close these are by just doing that cross-section analysis but yeah you can that's how I'm able to it's a little bit finicky to have to edit in place hit finish and then kind of watch it but I think next time if I were to do this I would I would I would know that I need to have the motor in the gear and the bottom cover all in the same component that way when I'm modifying that one component I don't have to keep hitting finish edit in place to see my joints update so if I had if I thought about a little bit more I could have made it a little bit more cleaner but that is the main thing that kind of makes this thing work is how do you get your gears in the right position and as long as you know you have a working mounting holes for your motor you should be good so that's kind of how that's working yeah the next thing is how did you create these gears right so these gears are all generated with a plug-in so there's plugins for Fusion 360 and this one's called the GF gear generator so you can download this for macro windows it's a free download and you can edit one of the things that I like about it is that when you are creating a gear you can't go back into the gear to modify the settings because it's kind of a it's a bit of a script that just executes your your hard-coded values and that's it you can't modify it again so I mean you do have a timeline and I guess you could modify it here like you can modify the the pattern or the sweep but what's interesting is this when you generate it you get this sketch and this the sketch gives you the values that were used to create the the gear so let me show you when I'm creating a gear the the plug-in shows up under the utilities tab and there's where you can either create the gear or use the drop-down to create a specific type of gear in this case I'm using the simple double helical gear and then here are the values do you want it to be double helical I do and then the module this is how thick you want your teeth to be essentially so I go with one millimeter that tends to be tends to print out pretty good for like a stock 3d printer nozzle and then the number of teeth is is something that you really have to consider for this gear the number of teeth is actually the z so z equals 30 so for here I had 30 teeth and m is like the module size it's like the section size in my head so that's why I have it set to 1 number of teeth is 30 and then the gear height how tall is your gear I put what did I put I guess I put 10 because it's not showing up here so that's one of the values that doesn't get shown up uh the pressure angle is um I just leave that at 14.5 and then for the helical angle you could put like 45 degrees but I put 30 degrees I just felt like 30 degrees would be less aggressive on the 3d printer you could do 45 but I went with 30 and those are the values that I use you can see here ha helical angle yeah so that's how he got that going so it's nice that you have at least some sort of reference of what values were used and that just gets saved you can always hide that another thing that I kind of don't like about this is that you can't really define a diameter like the the number of teeth is what defines your diameter so trying to figure out the diameter for the internal gear the gear ring was difficult um if you look at my timeline I the first one I tried was 120 teeth so I just kept playing around different numbers until I got a dimension that was like big enough to encapsulate to to fit a gear because you can see the body of the gear is fairly large so I needed to figure out okay well how if I'm going to fit this gear if I'm going to fit this motor inside the gear the gear needs to be x amount of diameter and that's how I was able to figure that out so I just kept punching in numbers and generating different gears and seeing what that diameter was in one way to find out what the diameter is of your of your kind of gear you can click on one of these lines here you can see at the bottom it says length try a different one maybe the surface nope let me try this external surface yep radius hit i on that for inspect or measure and you can see the diameter is 87.5 so that's that you can always click on one of these faces and it'll give you a radius and then a diameter if you hit i on your keyboard for inspect um yeah uh so the way the external gears are made is similarly they give you a sketch and it tells you the radial thickness if you're doing an internal one how many teeth what's your angle so if you're doing a gear system where you're doing uh you know an internal gear and a regular gear you just want to make sure that your helical angle is the same your module is the same and that's it really the radial thickness is just how thick you want your ring to be I just put three millimeters it does some weird math stuff here where it adds all these zeros but that doesn't really matter in this case it ends up being the a pretty a pretty even radius here you can see the diameter is 98 which is uh keep the magic number there and then once you generate it you can do all the sorts of um you know features uh to make your gear have extra features here is a look at the very first top so the very first top I had the gear the internal gear built into the top cover and I showed you kind of why you know because then I'd have to print all of this again and creating one gear there's a lot of movements that your printer has to do a lot of g-code big files so that's why I figured that let me just make the top cover not have a gear and just make this you know internal thing have a little bit of a registration and key so you can slot it into uh into the top cover um so that's that's why I made it separate cool let's see what are some other stuff about the gear um I found uh a bit of a tip here for my for the the gear for the actual motor I reduced the top in the bottom height to about a millimeter so it's two millimeters shorter than the internal gear and that's because when you're printing and this is like the top surface or the bottom surface your printer will tend to just kind of expand and what I found is um sometimes you'll have to clean these teeth up and I found that you you'll you'll you'll end up cleaning less if your gear is shorter than your internal gear because you're not having to worry about uh the surface is mating you know what I mean so that's kind of what I found um I ended up cleaning this up a little bit um but maybe we could add chan first to these teeth so that you know your printer isn't printing this on the first layer because getting this to print on the first layer can be quite difficult because they're very very short profile things about a millimeter you know in size so that's why they're kind of difficult to print and um another reason to make your gears external is to print them very slowly so that you print really nicely and uh you don't have to worry about printing um this massive assembly and then your gear ends up not working so that's why I made the gears separate so that's kind of a fun tip okay what's another thing to talk about um talked about the uh the gears that's really the main thing to talk about in assembly context um let's talk about like the the sensor here for um for tracking um which which frame it's on so this is a photo interrupter and it has a t-slot body and because of the size I figured it'd be best to have it on the outside but if you look on the inside here I probably could have figured out a way to mount the photo interrupter inside of the case so you wouldn't see it and then you could probably bring these notches on the inside so that you wouldn't actually see it and it would look much cleaner but I thought about the more I thought about that the more I thought well I'm going to film how this is working and if you have your sensor accessible rather viewable you get a better idea of what it looks like so I figured out let's not have it hidden inside the case let's break it out so you can actually see it and when I'm filming it you can see how it's working how the sensor is keeping track of the frames it has these these little notches they're passing through the IR LED there's an LED in here and whenever this passes through it it's able to track that it's able to sense that and um if that was on the inside how the hell would I show that I guess I would show it through CAD but I didn't want to so that's kind of a thing about thinking about like what is the goal and what is the use here you know so you have to kind of think about like is it better to show it or hide it and in this case for this project for this assembly it made sense to have it on the outside it actually makes the assembly easier too because like hey there's some screws I know where it is I can access it and yeah so that's cool so that's kind of the thinking behind that and you're probably wondering where's the the cricket and the feather well I made that a decision to have everything kind of flow outside of this little wire hole so the idea is that the top ring you'd have your wiring all kind of go through this center ring and uh they all get routed through here and then my cricket board just gets mounted externally so I didn't even want to worry about that so that's kind of a good thing let's see you want to use a different motor driver or something you don't have to worry about mounting the electronics inside of this base plate speaking of the base plate you'll notice these giant holes in the in the uh in the bottom here in the opening why are those holes there well two things um you save material and you save print time and that's really the main thing is uh if you have a lot of area and you're not using it just cut it out and you'll save a lot of printing time so that with these holes with these four holes here I save about an hour and a half of printing time and the base plate itself is about two millimeters thick so yeah it doesn't really reduce any of the rigidity of it and you're wondering well isn't light going to leak out of here since you need to encapsulate all the light now really the light doesn't leak too much there's where is the light the light's in this little red thing here and yeah the light points up so it's not really you know there's not really much light leaking out from the bottom so there's nothing to worry about there one thing I guess I didn't show yet is like the internal ring right so this is what holds the top cover up so you have this this is a bit of a frame and then at the top there you have this uh let me hide the top cover where are you there you are yeah and then hide the analysis there let me hide the ring there so there's just the top cover I mean the internal ring uh the internal ring has these tabs that get secured with hex nuts and screws it gets secured to the to the base plate itself the ring is I don't know 20 millimeters tall 24 millimeters tall and it just there's this little groove here right this has about 2.4 millimeters of clearance I added these chamfers here to minimize the surface area that the lip will touch the lip from the top cover so let me hide um a lot of the things so you can get a good look at just the things I want you to look at so give me a second while I sort out my components here all right so the top is right over here there you go that's a better look at that maybe bring back the gear there you go all right and then I can do section analysis there so there you can see how how these things are mating there yeah so you have a good amount of clearance between these surfaces right about half a millimeter and um I made it I made that channel a little bit bigger because I wasn't sure how much clearance I needed it turns out that was a good amount of clearance there's not much slop in there and because sometimes you get zits and things from the surfaces of just perimeters and no infill that having more clearance is a little bit better there um so if you look at the underside and let me turn off the bottom you can get a look at the lip that I want to show you here come on here it is here's that lip so the lip is ah two millimeters tall and this surface never touches um the inner ring if I'm not mistaken let me do a section analysis okay um maybe it does I'm seeing here that yeah maybe it does rest on it a little bit but I think if I moved it up a little bit um I think it just barely touches it which is which is good because yeah you don't want the internal ring to touching the surface but yeah that's uh that's how to minimize the friction there is just to have this little surface area touching as you can and there's no ball bearings or anything here it's just a ring that's it um yeah and one one kind of advice thing I did add a little bit of lubricant to the groove and that really did help a lot I reduced a lot of the friction also you can use a deburring tool um you can sand it down too if you want to really really nice I think I did that too a little bit of light sanding or something um and that reduced a ton of friction and it made it really quiet too um yeah but that's kind of the main things I want to talk about this again it's the first time using assembly contextules which is really new to me so I'm still kind of learning that it's it's it's slightly parametric I don't think I have too many pair and I have none I think some of the pieces have parameters but other ones are not um yeah because you really kind of want to hard code this for what your parts that you're building for um yeah so I don't think you want to make it any bigger the only parametric things that are kind of editable I guess are the slots like you can change that number of slots of something else if you have another animation that you want to do all right now you can see here it's actually 20 slots and in the learn guide I made it 10 because there's only 10 frames of the party pair animation but I think you can add up to 24 max and if you want to add any more than that you're just gonna have to make the whole thing bigger which is doable as well depending on the size of your printer but those are some fun tips for doing internal gear mechanisms turn tables anything like that I think this is a good method don't forget to check out the gear plugin it's called GF gear generator if you have another gear plugin that you think is better than this one maybe that's like editable after the fact of building it let me know I'd love to try out other gear generators that'd be really cool also don't forget about the cricket feather wing you can get the cricket feather wing with your back in stock if you sign up to get notified or you can purchase it from one of their reseller distributors like digikey also have the learn guide for you if you want to download this Fusion 360 assembly you can do so we also have a lot of the parts and and PCBs available to download as well in our github repo which I'll have linked in the description of this video that's going to do it for this one folks good luck with all your maker endeavors but until next time remember to make a great day bye folks I'll do my party parrot impersonation