Customer
Our client is a large French manufacturer and decorator of traditional bowls with ears.
Manufactured product
Writing on bowls
The writing on the bowl is done with a special ink. Thanks to the ink marker on the bowl, you can personalise the bowls with the text of your choice.
Whether you are looking for a promotional item, a goodie in your company's colours or a gift idea, personalised bowls are a must-have item!
Objective
Copy the human hand in the writing phase on the bowls, allowing for a very uniform and repeatable writing.
Problematic issues
The writing area on the bowls is not flat, so it is necessary to interpolate the up/down and forward/backward movements of the pen to ensure a uniform line of characters.
This non-planar area also implies a deformation of the characters.
As the characters were previously handmade, the font is not fully defined as it is in a word processor.
At the time of writing, the bowl is not yet provided with its protective enamel layer, the material absorbs the ink to a greater or lesser extent depending on the ambient atmospheric conditions.
Solution and result
The machine is composed of axes to move the nib, an axis to rotate the bowl, a pump to feed the nib with ink, an ink storage jar and a control unit.
Operating principle :
On the program, the user indicates the texts he wishes to inscribe as well as the associated quantities, then places a bowl on the dedicated support and starts writing.
The pen is positioned on the bowl and the ink is sucked out of the jar and injected directly onto the bowl. The pump is a plunger pump, which ensures a constant flow of ink during the writing phase of a character.
In order to adjust the fineness of the writing, a potentiometer allows the flow of ink to be adjusted instantaneously, thus ensuring good writing quality.
The bowl support rotates and this rotation is interpolated with the movements of the nib.
When a bowl is finished, the user removes it from the holder, puts on a new one and starts writing the next bowl by means of a simple push button.
IHM
Human-computer interface
