I basically finished up the linear motion for the CAM. All that remains is some minute adjustments.

Here’s some problems I ran into:

• The geometry was incredibly hard due to the lack of space, and I ended up just trying a bunch of possibilities and landing on one that worked decently. While I was planning to use belts, I switched to gears after I saw how little space there was.
• Screws were hitting the servo for the gear changing mechanism, so I rearranged it so the lip is on the outside of the plate, giving me a precious 4mm to work with.
• It was hard to come up with a way to ensure the full range of motion always happens. There’s nothing pushing the gears up after the CAM pushes it down. Initially, I was planning to do some complex linkage relying on the definition of an ellipse (the sum of distances from the foci is constant). I tried sketching it out but there was literally no space. At the end, I thought of tying a string to both gears and wrap it around an idler to keep the constant sum of distances.

This thing’s gonna look clean once everything is colored. All that remains is some minute adjustments and I can move on to a V2.