Pokebowl

Summary Section: 

Do you like pokemon? Yea? That’s awesome. Do you want to relive those childhood memories of watching that pokemon show with Ash and Team Rocket? Me too to be honest, that show was the best. Well, look no further, here is a not at all accurate, silver-grey, pokemon fidget toy for you to play with for a day or two and then never look at again. (note; fidget does NOT actually catch animals or do any of that cool stuff, it just makes noises and moves a little)

Lesson Plan & Activity:

In this project, I used Solidwork’s sketch offsets, extrudes, and cuts to create my own telescoping Pokemon fidget toy. I worked with my partner, Mark who helped provide feedback and helped troubleshoot problems we encountered. Although we were not required to have the same designs, we eventually decided on one final design to maximize cohesiveness. 

The initial specific constraints of this project were as follows: 

• The sketch must begin with a constraint box (center-rectangle created from the origin)
• The outermost line must fit within an 8cm x 8cm box or equivalent area (64cm^2) note: this one was not followed as we had to enlarge our clover for better telescoping propertiesDimensions/relations should be efficient
• It is suggested but not required to fully define your entire sketch
• The sketch must contain zero error messages
• Demonstrate efficient use of “”Offset Identities"

Assembly/Construction Instruction Section:

1. Import image of Pokéball silhouette into SolidWorks.

2. Create an outline of the imported image on your sketch plane.

3. Divide the Pokéball into 3 parts: the upper crest, the middle circle, and the bottom crest.

4. Reverse extrude each of the parts until they reach the center.

5. Apply “Boss-Extrude” on one line and “Extrude-Cut” on the next, in that order, starting from the outermost line of each shape until you reach the center. Make sure to select “Blind “for the first Boss-Extrude and “Up to Surface for the rest, and “Through All” for the Extrude Cuts.

6. Set the height of each Extrude and Cut to 1.00 cm.

*Tip: You can follow these instructions for just one of the crest shapes starting from step 4 and mirror everything after finishing to make the other crest

An initial major hurdle we encountered was connecting the shapes together, so that in the final print, it would be one whole piece as opposed to three separate ones, which we unfortunately did not think of beforehand. We eventually decided to simply offset the inner circle outward a few more times until it was overlapping the other two pieces.

Another design change my partner and I made was increasing the thickness of our fidgets from 0.5 cm to 1 cm. Our initial print was far thinner than we intended so we decided to double it. This can be see on the real-life photos of our prints. 

One final design change my partner and I made was to round out our fidgets using the fillet tool. This gave our fidgets a more streamlined look in favor of the sharp, geometric look it had previously. 

Below is an additional photo of our fidget that may be insightful. It is a cross-section image taken using the SolidWorks program. Originally, the angle of the extrudes was set to 15 degrees, however it was changed to 25 degrees to improve the functionality of the toy.