You can’t have a turntable without an arm! Well, I guess you could, but where would you put the pen? Here’s some of the design files for the arm. The hole pattern on the larger part was made to match a servo hub from SparkFun, which is also from ServoCity, which provided a STEP file. (Ignore the heart-shaped thing for now. It’s experimental!)
Luckily I was able to open the STEP file in both Rhino and in FreeCAD! It’s like I won the CAD file lottery or something. But seriously, if there’s ever a competition to convert from one format to another and then another and another… I think I can win.
I was able to get what I needed to get the hole spacing right, which is all I really needed this time. The holes are tapped for 6-32 screws. Once again I’m mixing Imperial and Metric. Sigh… Mission (somewhat) accomplished, I guess.
The arm consists of three layers of laser-cut pieces stacked up, and screws to hold them together. I played around with materials a little bit, trying wood in the center, but finally choosing the red acrylic. I thought about clear, but there is at least one other red element right now, and possibly more to come, so I chose the black and red combo. Always a good choice!
There’s also a hinge I cut from a 1mm thick plastic I got from the Midland scrapyard. (Windell from EMSL thinks it might be polypropylene.) The laser cut it fine once I figured out the proper settings… and covered it with masking tape on both sides.
And yes, I did borrow a few ideas from the Egg-Bot design. Sharpies, FTW! Pen holder designers unite, and all that. There’s a 8-32 square nut in there, really snug. I do not have a nice thumbscrew like EMSL uses… yet!