Quick-Lock & Sprocket 2.0 - 3d printed automation  

I'm almost 100% certain I'm never going to need to make something like this, but I love the series so much. A lot to learn and appreciate from the thought and build process. Keep up the amazing work.

it's helpful to more precisely characterize the problem. you're correct that discontinuities in the walls of the channel the nuts are sliding down will cause a jam, but not all discontinuities. if there is a ledge, that's an opportunity to snag, but if it's an overhang, the discontinuity is facing the wrong way for the nut to grab on. so you could increase your tolerance by having the channel in the lower mating parts slightly wider than the channel in the upper mating parts, and then gradually taper back to the original width so that this can be cascaded without exiting your width tolerance. to be clear I'm talking about a fraction of a millimeter extra width, and multiple centimeters of channel for the taper, so the actual angle of the taper would be miniscule

Absolute art! You are true inspiration for me. Comprehensive yet compact explanations, clear graphics and beautiful components, I could not give you enough praise.

Love how you explain your thought process and stay criticial to your design. Very inspirational, keep up good work!

It’s surprising how fascinating it is to watch you go through this process. You do a great job thinking about the various end-users. Thank you for sharing this!

Your industrial engineering insights are great; different color for wear components, and operators seeing how a machine works helps them diagnose it.

Your Content is so inspiring, to not give up on tiny problems and step a little back and take a other view on your own ideas for a simple but brilliant update on the product. In this country we need more type of pragmatic engineers of your kind.

Wie du einfach aus dem absoluten Nichts auftauchst und so geniale Videos / Projekte machst. Mega 👌🏽

The idea with magazines at personal workspaces shows how innovative your ideas are, keep going!

Thanks for these productions! Your design approach is highly commendable, and in my opinion represents the top echelon of design methodologies which help manage the engineering of very complex systems. After years of designing various industrial machines, I discovered the modular approach to be absolutely superior than the old-school "single frame" approach. While the modular philosophy requires significantly more design work to split machine sections into interchangeable sub-assemblies, the approach provides invaluable flexibility when one part of a system under development fails to meet expectations. This becomes increasingly convenient as the complexity of systems under development increases, especially when the project includes a mix of proven parts/assemblies to be integrated with experimental or unproven ones. It stands to reason that is far easier to make design changes for a simple subassembly than it is to rearrange the typical pivots, shaft centers, gear/sprocket modules etc. in a conventional layout, even for plate-frame assemblies, but you can't blame us old-timers for taking the "simpler" approach "back in the day", because before CAD/CAM, when everything was designed on paper by hand, the time required to modularize machinery (or even have a selection of OTS parts) was unthinkable due to prohibitive expense, so our goal was to "get it right the first time" because every ECO subtracted from the bottom line. Now, I can simulate every engineered component of a complex system, from mechanical drives, power systems, materials attributes, fluid flow, heat transfer, etc., to digital control systems themselves, thanks to virtualized computing and networking, and use these through many different iterations before a final design is selected for prototyping and testing. Love ya NASTRANS, COSMOL, and National Instruments!!!!

Even if you may not have a specific need for the project, it's fantastic that you still enjoy and appreciate the series. There's always something valuable to learn from the thought process and the intricate build techniques. It's inspiring to see the creativity and innovation behind such projects. Keep up the great work! 👍🌟🔧

This is impressive; looking forward to watching your progress on the project!

Wonderful work! I came across your channel on the last video and you have quickly risen to be my favorite channel with a focus on novel manufacturing techniques. Given your simultaneously stellar project designs and video production, I can't wait to watch your channel grow! All the best

Your comment at 3:20 is perfect and so true. Some people want to print EVERYTHING....like, why?? There’s so many better and cheap options out there for many scenarios haha. Excellent work! Keep it up.

Congrats on your video getting into my recommended just 30 minutes after being published despite me never have been watching your channel before. The video is interesting, thanks!

Fantastic work as always! Thanks for producing this.

Absolutely excellent! Keep up the good work!

I love your engineering insights, your channel is brilliant

Incredible content as always!

Digging the design aspect and you walking through everything, very cool to see.

So many lessons in this. Reducing part for ease of assembly. Clear windows to aid debugging. Hatches to access wear parts. Making wear parts easy to identify. Don't use threaded holes for locating. Dual purpose design of a dowel pin + flexure locking alignment system.

Great stuff! Thanks for sharing! Systems Engineering at its finest!

👍🏻👨‍🔧📚 Even though I may not have a direct use for the project, I'm absolutely hooked on this series! There's so much to learn and appreciate from the thought and build process. It's fascinating to see the Quick-Lock & Sprocket 2.0 come to life through 3D printing and automation. Keep up the amazing work, and I can't wait to see what else you create! 🙌🔥😊

Awesome to follow your process here; I learn a lot (I'll likely never end up building bolt sorting robots, but you have a lot of interesting design principles and process). The explanations, illustrations and overall production quality of your videos are super inspirational as well!

Excellent work as always!

I love this channel😍 Thank you so much for this SUPER COOL content! 😎Looking forward to the next video. Keep it up!

I have already learned so much from this series. Thank you!

I'm hoping that the Opulo folks catch sight of this. You both seem to be working in the same mid-scale-manufacturing domain, with some very compatible design philosophies.

This is crazy amount of effort

In this age of click bait title and Shorts, you are a true content creator.

Your work looks so professional throughout this series!

Love your projects! Super neat and professional looking. Greetings from Argentina

The parts that you design look so cool!

You're only the channel like this that I actually turned on notifications for

It quickly became my favorite channel…

Thank you for the tiniest details you teach us, the tip of printing all the spacers as one piece is genius and never saw it before in any proyect. Im amazed how you are improving your equipment so much that it may become the new product you'll be selling 😂😂🎉

Incredible work! I feel really inspired!

Oh dude... That quick release mag... UGH That's so satisfying... You are a god!

Hi Christopher, have you though about putting a worm and worm wheel on this design it will let you put the NEMA 17 motor at an angle of 90 degrees right above your feeding wheel. You will have an immediate reduction that is big enough and a worm wheel can't drive the worm. Keep it up! It looks amazing!

Another brilliant video, always inspiring

The factory must grow!

I love this stuff!... you put them in a box! Oh, so good.

I really love your work. Inspiring!

One of my favourite RU-vid channels!

Gorgeous design

Amazing work

super cool project and well made video, got a new sub.

Love the magazine quicklock feature

Beautiful Design 😮

this is real engineering :) makes me happy to watch

Seriously can't get enough of these videos. I feel like I learn so much about design. Please go more in depth on your design considerations, CAD-things and yeah basically just make every video 4x as long.

👏📐🛠 It's amazing to see the thought and build process behind projects like this, even if we might not personally need to make something similar. The series provides a valuable opportunity to learn and appreciate the craftsmanship and innovation involved. The Quick-Lock & Sprocket 2.0 with 3D printed automation sounds intriguing! I'm curious to see how it works and the possibilities it opens up. Keep up the fantastic work and continue inspiring us with your creations! 👍🔧🏗

I love your work 😍

I’ve been searching for a video like this for so long! One of my future goals is to have a RU-vid channel making things. I tried it once, and after doing a project, setting up the camera to capture the process was so time consuming. I thought there had to be a better way. I’ve been searching for this for a long time.

Absolutely amazing work. If I may offer a humble suggestion. A little more dither to the nut magazine will prevent the nut train jamming. We normally try to design out dither but small vibrations can help precision mechanical systems perform efficiently.

Keep up the good work!

I love the idea of filling up magasines for use anywhere, sounds pratical

I love this project.

3:40 HOLY SHIT, i never thought about this but its actually genius! Thank you very much i really learned alot today

Thanks for all the off-topics you share :)

❤ das ganze noch auf deutsch und ich wäre glücklich 😂. Sehr gut gemacht.

(Oh boy, this is a long one) I'm glad to see a sprocket design handles nuts just fine; I was worried about how it would handle anything besides screws. Have you been able to test with washers yet? Out of common hardware types, I think washers might be one of the more difficult ones to get working with a sprocket-based metering system. That repackaged gearbox is very nice. Not just in looks, but I also appreciate all the little functional details: the 'sprocket' being easy to swap helps for replacing worn out components, like you mentioned, but it also also makes it easy to swap between different hardware types; also, sliding the dispenser block directly into the light grey guide rails is a super clean integration and leaves room for even larger diameter sprockets if required. I do have a point of design feedback on the gearbox: Conventional wisdom says that greasing the gearbox would have huge advantages for service life. But this iteration cannot be greased because the indexing sprocket would almost certainly carry some of that grease out to the hardware it is dispensing--not good. I'm sure you already thought of that; but I say it to set up my suggestion: move the indexing sprocket outside of the main gearbox casing, and power it by a live axel output shaft. To keep the gearbox and motor within the magazine tube profile would probably require flipping the motor around. Off the top of my head I'm picturing something like this (in the sense that the motor and output shaft project from the same face of a power transmission system): wcproducts.com/collections/gearboxes/products/versaplanetary-180-drive This has two big pros in my mind: - Allows the gearbox to be greased, extending service life - Easier to see the wear condition of the indexing sprocket - Easier access to motor wires Downsides I've though of so far are: - Reduced mechanism visibility to the user - Slightly increased gearbox height - Might increase the number of steps for sprocket replacement (Maybe just make the end support arm for the output shaft removable? Idk, that's probably getting too specific for a text explanation.) On a separate note, I love the idea of the magazine quick lock. But I can't help worrying about the fatigue life of the flexing section of the orange clip/bracket. I have a suggestion for indexing the magazines: Extend the light grey guide rails up to interface with the... spout thing (the component you show at 6:07). What I'm picturing is that loading a new magazine would be an upward motion, not a horizontal one. This would of course require some kind of locking/latching mechanism that would actively force the top of the magazine stack against the bottom of the spout once a magazine is loaded, in order to avoid any gap. About the alignment issue more broadly, I think there's a chance that the alignment tolerance could be made less sensitive by extending the spout downwards (essentially just do a CAD "extrude" command out from the spout's exit face) so that the nuts have a straight section after the bend and before they reach the spout/magazine transition point. My gut feeling is that would reduce the rotation forces acting on the nuts by the time they cross that point, possibly making them less sensitive to small misalignments or gaps. At least, I hope that's the case, because even though dowel pins are definitely superior to screws for locating parts in an assembly, those dowel pins are still inserted into an FDM 3D print, so the overall locational accuracy is still only as good at 3D print which is, as you noted, not super precise. Finally, one trick that might help to completely avoid gaps between mating faces like this is to add a *slightly* raised lip around the edge in question (like, only tenths of a millimeter high). That makes sure that if the mating faces are brought into contact, the raised lip *must* be the first point to close off, even if the mating surface is slightly out of flat (which is almost guaranteed with FDM printing). Wow that got even longer than I expected. And that's saying something. Looking forward to the next video!

I love your content ❤ keep it up!

Amazing series! Also, thanks for not including background music. Maybe not everyone's favorite decision, but I appreciate it 👍

Feels like a gate system for the magazine inlet/outlets will touch on a lot of the issues you're dealing with. I'm thinking about all sorts of ways to bridge the interface between conduits. Carefully changing angles could help, compliant mechanisms at the boundary could help, smooth sheet plastic inserts could help, like strips of acrylic/PET/etc that line chute, either entirely or just near the boundary. I think you might see a benefit from adding a freewheel sprocket across the interface which will interleave it's fingers between parts to break up trains.

Have you considered doing some kind of distributed controls for these removable parts magazines? Once filled and taken to a remote workstation, the attached motor can still be commanded to dispense the desired number of components? Love this series, and please continue to share your incredible engineering designs with us!

Fantastic!

This series is great! Question: how do you get that finish on your 3d Prints? (as seen on the orange quick lock part at 10:04)

Regarding lubrication: The German company igus manufactures mechanical components from plastics that do not require lubrication. They call them "motion plastics". But not only do they make various components from them, they also offer the materials for 3D printing, as filaments for FDM, powder for SLS, and recently even resin for SLA.

03:40 - neat trick! 👍

7:55 Looking at the striped patterns gave me a fun and unexpected optical illusion.

Very cool

I am loving the content. This is one of the first series I click before I start my RU-vid spree. I remember you mentioned you want to practice making videos before showcasing the machine in the intro. I think a good place to start is to change the microphone setup you use for the "interview"-like format (Seen at 8:04). The audio quality during voice-over is already sufficient in my opinion. Whatever you do, I'll watch this series until the end. Thank you for taking us along.

i love the color coding of wear parts

Chamfer the mating channel to prevent the nuts from jamming.

This is great

厉害，好精巧的设计

Hello. I wanted to say that you have a really good mind for engineering and i would really like if you made tutorials on how you use the CAD. like maybe even just recordings of yourself doing it, not even having to explain it. i think i could learn a lot from it as i am about to enter college in the next two years

that's so cool

Very cool video explaining your engineering thoughts! At 6:47 I was thinking if you have a short straight way also in the "blue" top part, it should become less sensitive to misalignment, since that part contact point than doesn't cause also change the path direction (from curved to straight).

Like many others I am super interested in this. But have no use for it and I love it lol.

Also der Kanal ist große Klasse! Zeigst du auch den Aufbau der Vereinzelung? Mach weiter so...das ist super interessant!😊

greetings from Russia, spread out more technical tasks - I love them wildly. Option how to get rid of precise gears: automatic weapons. You can make a connecting rod that would push out exactly 1 part. Stepper motors will not be needed, and the design will be smaller

Adding a small angle to the top of the magazine should solve any issues with the nuts getting stuck. This doesn't even have to be something you design into the print, simply sanding the edges down a small amount would be enough to fix the jams and should provide the angle to allow the nuts to self right back to the desired orientation if that is required.

You should add a stopper to the latch, that prevents screws from falling through, when there is no magazine attached.

You don't need perfectly matching output and input channels. Outwardly flaring the walls of the incoming channels and using the channel itself as a locating feature will solve the problem.

Amazing work and videos. Ty for sharing with us. Theres some way to this machine work with different sizes of bolts and nuts? Or better, sort different sizes in different cabbinets? I made a machine to sort different types of sample tubes in different cabbinets base on qr code in each tube (the machine send the qr code to main program via wifi to get whitch cabinet the tube need to go). Keep going. Your machine is fanstastic.

I might be wrong, but I think you can just put a nice chamfer at the edges even if the bolt rotated slightly, it could adjust itself due the angle of the chamfer and it wouldn't stuck, I did a similar thing in a conveyor belt, and it worked no jams.

Congratulations, you've discovered climbing hex nuts :)

I used to work in Industrial Automation - I'm very impressed that you've managed to get good repeatability with 3D Printed parts. Have you come across IGUS polymers - which give very good performance in wear parts or where low friction is required. They are available as printer filament too. I was thinking they might be a good choice for your paddle wheel.

7:27 - put a small chamfer in the pink area with a largest radius to the lower section. (Time of writing 7:30)

Hey man, Love the series! I've got one suggestion to improve the quality; Speak louder, but move the mic back (To keep the overall loudness the same). By speaking louder the way you talk changes and it can (should) make an significant improvement to the video.

Next you need a funnel in the bottom with a valve so that you have a single shot ready to go. If you have a way to detect that a plastic bag is over the funnel to release it then you can really crank out lots of bags. Perhaps with a couple of capacitive sensors or some of those film pcb strain gauges.

Awesome video! I'm interested in what you have done previously - how did you gain the experience and knowledge that you show in this design process?

Awesome work! Silly question/suggestion: Why not add a very subtle, long stretched, funnel-like chamfer to the entry of the light pink part at 6:58 so that even if the upper turquoise and lower pink part of the construction are offset by let’s say up to 0.5 mm (depending on the size of the conveyed nuts) doesn’t make the train of nuts to get stuck? (Grüße aus Frankfurt BTW).

Again, simply stunning. What make/type is that grey filament you are using, it looks a really nice finish.???.

What material did you use to print this? Such a cool project. Thank you for sharing your insight!

Great series! Keep it up! I don’t know that I have a need for this but would you ever consider making the 3D models available?

As usual, awesome stuff, keep it up! How many iterations on a design does something like this take?

9:40 conical index plugs the cone will self centre - like wheel nuts one a Car wheel are cone shaped.