This page is a continuation of the Rack and Pinion Mechanism project
Adjusting Design:
In order to motorize the rack and pinion, we will be attaching a continuous servo motor to the pinion gear. In order to do this we need to modify the pinion gear to have a smaller hole in the middle that is just big enough for the servo screw to fit through. We will also have to modify the rack because the screws that will be holding it are smaller. The backing needs to be modified to add a spot to mount the servo and the locations of the hardware holes have to be adjusted. The backing will also have the same engravings as before and we will be adding the curved arrows that were on the pinion onto the backing instead. Once all these changes were made the parts were laser-cut out and assembled to make the following:
Coding Servo Motor:
To code the servo to move the rack and pinion I started with code to run a servo back and forth and adjusted the time it moves each direction so that it only moves as far as the rack can in either direction.
Files: