Say Hello to Our Iron Man Arc Reactor Yoyo

Hello Again!


Thanks for visiting our page again. 



Today we'll share our initial yoyo design, design specifications, and a Gannt chart which gives our design and manufacturing schedule.

Yo-yo Design

Our yo-yo is inspired on Iron Man’s Arc Reactor. It will consist of four parts which we named: the cage, the filling, circuit board holder, and housing. Our yo-yo will also have two LED lights, a coin battery, and two switches. We will use thermoforming to create the circuit board holder. The other three parts will all be made using injection molding. Because we have five members and four components, we decided to split one component per person and have two people work on the most challenging component of our yo-yo. Priscilla will work on the cage, Steve and Rachel on the circuit board holder, Thomas will make filling, and Erica the housing.

Design for Manufacturing Specific Principles
 The first decision we made with consideration to design for manufacturing is that we minimized the number of parts on our yo-yo. Each of our four parts performs maximum function to achieve all of our aesthetic and structural requirements. For instance, the cage provides the main image of the Arc Reactor while also fulfilling the function of friction fitting into the housing unit. In addition, having four specified parts that fit together in a specific way allows for ease of testing and alteration. As a whole, we decided to make the majority of our edges rounded for ergonomic and manufacturing benefits.

We also considered the different methods of manufacturing we are planning to use when designing our parts. We made the wall thickness of our injection molded parts as thin as possible to reduce both cost and cycle time. We also aimed for a uniform thickness when possible to avoid any warping caused by cooling time differences. Our thermoformed part, on the other hand, has a much less complex shape than the injection molded parts. Due to the limited dimensional quality of thermoformed parts, we decided that we should use thermoforming to make a thin, flat part to serve electronic housing purposes rather than a part that fulfills structural or aesthetic needs. We decided to place the battery in the middle and the LEDs on either side to ensure that the weight of our yo-yo is balanced around the center.

Specifications
As part of the initial design, we created a table of specifications detailing the critical dimensions, mass, and estimated rotation speed of our yoyo. We used information from our Solidworks models as well as physics calculations to obtain the specs. below.

Quantity	Value	Tolerance	Measurement
String Gap	0.075 in	+/- 0.015	Caliper
Housing Outer Diameter	2.500 in	+/- 0.015	Caliper
Filling Outer Diameter	2.180 in	+/- 0.015	Caliper
Circuit Board Holder Outer Diameter	2.200 in	+/- 0.01	Caliper
Cage Inner Diameter	2.350 in	+/- 0.01	Caliper
Total Mass	68g	N/A	Scale
Rotation Speed	942 rpm	N/A	N/A

Timeline
Lastly, we created a Gantt chart to keep us on track with our design and manufacturing timeline. All of the major tasks, due dates, and members responsible for each task are included. For the full chart, see here.

Well that's all for today! Thanks for being a part of our journey!

Chao

Meet the Team

Hello!
We are Stark Industries, a group of five Mechanical Engineering Juniors at MIT.
Our team members include: Steven Gerasimoff (back left), Thomas Broughton, Rachel Adenekan (front left), Priscilla Agosto, and Erica Green.

We aim to transform the toy industry by producing some of the coolest yo-yos you've ever seen!  Look out for more posts in which we will describe all our design and manufacturing secrets.

Chao, until next time.