Mr Jos's Industrial MOC's [Technic/EV3]

[Mr Jos]

Hello there,

Index:

Post #1: Steel coil, sheet metal perforating press

Post #2: High bay warehouse with conveyors for in/outfeed and a WMS system.

 

20years ago as a kid I played a lot with LEGO first with regular bricks, but fast fascinated by Technic models and had a "Technic Code Card" for "automation".

Now installing/servicing some real automated industrial machines I thought it would be fun to make "a part" of "one" of the machines I work with. At first it was supposed to be just a small part of a sheetmetal perforating eccentric press.

The press went easily up and down with a PF XL Motor after many prototypes, but it was missing something, some material to punch holes in. After trying to manual feeding in some paper it seemed it would work with very thin paper. So began the building of the whole press. Infeed guiding table to make the sheet stay in the middle and feeding rolls.

To make this all possible many orders were made for Technic sets to take apart and discovered BL (oh boy). Saw some EV3 video's on YT, mainly cars, and thought it would be perfect to make it fully automated.

Coilcar loading the "roll of steel" onto the decoiler.

Prototype was being build to cut the finished material, first with hand, then using a medium EV3 motor to mechanically cut with a technic brick.

The punch and die until now all LEGO received a machined steel punch, die remained LEGO.

The scissor got changed to a fast pneumatic one.

And there is the service technician, coming to align the machine. Who knows if this tripod is LEGO? I found it in my old boxes with LEGO but can't find it on BL.

I tried making a compressor that automatically shut off around 2.5bar and started around 2bar, as the scissor needs 1.9bar to cut. But failed, many times.

Finally the decoiler rolling the plate onto a scissor table to assist loading the plate in the infeed guiding table (adjustable in width) was made.

Some small adjustments were made to make it look better and perform without failing.

But here is a video made showing the working and how to choose the distance between the holes, amount of holes per sheet.

Next machine, "High Bay Warehouse, double sided with conveyor loading" is now in programming fase, will add a post to this topic when I find time for it.

Many greetings Mr Jos

Edited June 27, 2020 by Mr Jos
Added index with small photo's

[Mr Jos]

And here is the progress into the LEGO High Bay Warehouse. Little bit based on a high bay warehouse I constructed myselve in real.

First part would be the telescopic forks, I knew they would be the hardest part to keep small. So I tried many times and started again, each time thinking, it can't get smaller (and stay strong).

I wanted the telescopic forks to be realistic, extending all the way under a pallet and lift it up, being able to just put it on the other side of the rack. But this means both parts (top+middle) each need to extend 2/3 out of the center of the crane base, in 2 directions. This means no fixed points possible.

I had been searching if no one already made a crane like this, without just pulling the pallet with a hook instead of gently lifting it up I found none moving in both directions so far.

I had finally found a way but was lacking parts again and so waited for the order to get here. Because the smallest fork I could make was 8x16 studs I had to keep it to 1 fork instead of the real 2 small forks.

The problem now was, what if the crane is shut down with the forks not centered? The EV3 brick would not know and just destroy the racks/crane. So I tried many options and set with a color sensor looking at the bottom of the middle fork.

A base for the crane constructed,

Placed a touch sensor at the bottom to search the point 0 at the start of the program.

Suffered some problems (almost got crazy) with the guiding system to move the forks up/down, it always jammed due to the load hanging so heavily to 1 side. And started building the racks.

Redisgned the bottom part to fit the sensor inside the small frame, to get lower with the forks.

Racks rebuild on the bigger 48x48 studs baseplates making it all stronger.

Bringing new pallets with a roller conveyor, lowering onto a chain conveyor angled 90° bringing the pallet in position for pickup.

Video showing the current state. It still needs a bluetooth connection between the EV3 bricks for communication to pickup/dropoff and a WMS (Warehouse Managing System) to remember where the pallets are after a shutdown of the bricks. And little better positioning, but the crane program is getting pretty heavy already with all frequency drives I've made for soft start/stopping.

All black/yellow parts in the racks still need to be replaced with light Bley for uniform galvanized steel look.

Next to do is the screen selection of where to put/pickup a pallet.

If there are any questions I will try to answer them. Or if you have suggestions feel free to tell.

Greetings, Jos

Edited June 27, 2020 by Mr Jos
Edited typo's.

[Mr Jos]

Today the manager for the boxes was written, now selectable where to put and which one to bring back. Also multiple boxes can be waiting on the line.

Bringing back is only allowed when the infeed line is empty.

Used all my 5*11 panel plates so don't have enough boxes to fill it up.

[m00se]

Absolutely love this non-typical usage of Technic!