Semester Project: Width-adjustable Cup Holder with Temperature Measurement
Collaborate with Jiaqian Chen(Blog:jchen123@illinois.edu)
Currently, we are still in the planning stage trying to figure out what is the doable design. One design would be like Figure One where the bottom part is basically of fixed size and the arm is adjustable through a circular structure. The current design difficulty is that we have no idea how the joint part of those two arms are connected and how can we make sure that the two arms can be smoothly slides out, neither do we know the correct radian of the arms (and the radian is likely different at specific positions) so that when they slide out further it allows to hold larger/smaller cups.
Figure One
The second possible design is very similar to the adjustable round table in this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOp5j_57LAE . We are basically going to have an adjustable bottom part, and for the bottle, we are going to use an elastic band to wrap around it in order to keep it fixed at the position. The difficulty of this design is clearly the bottom part. In the YouTube video, there are a lot of metal joint parts and we were thinking whether it is possible to just 3D print all the parts that when assembled together it would have the same adjustable function. The possible alternative to the bottom part also can be a flexible clip (the idea is similar as car phone holder, Figure Two).
Figure Two
Once we decided which design to go for, we are going to measure normal size range of bottles and start to draw the parts in Fusion360 in order to 3D-printed it.