Robotic Manipulation Clock Lab: Working! 
by aburks on Oct.26, 2010, under Classwork
After a total of around 4 hours on the robot, Nico and I got the arm to work! We have two modes: one that displays the current time, and one that will count off time from a predefined starting point. Here are some videos of us testing at about 1:10AM on Sunday night.
I had to modify the pen and eraser holder a little bit to make it work. I needed to make the drip area fatter, because the fingers don’t actually close all the way. Also, I needed to mount the pen and eraser at a really close angle, because it took two seconds to rotate the tool by 90 degrees, which was unacceptable. By adding a fancy part to the original assembly, I was able to make it all work.
November 4th, 2010 on 9:05 PM
Hey Andrew,
Just wondering how you make your solidworks look so pretty. E-mail me back!
Fellow mechanical engineer,
Marco
P.S. Great work!
November 4th, 2010 on 9:57 PM
Hey Marco!
Bundled with SolidWorks (including the student edition) there is a program called “PhotoView 360″. This program basically replaced the PhotoView add-in to SolidWorks. You can open SolidWorks files in this separate program and use it to do nice 3d renders.
While it carries over material information from SolidWorks, you can overwrite them for the renders with PhotoView materials. You can also apply scenes and mess with lighting and depth perception. There are some tutorials online. Like SolidWorks, the best way to learn PhotoView 360 is to play around with it!
-Andrew Burks