As the final project for UCLA's MAE C297A: Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing, our class was tasked with creating and marketing a viable product using solely rapid prototyping manufacturing methods. Myself and three others decided to create a business card embossing system that uses geared rollers to leave a fully customizable, visible, and tangible indentation on a stack of cards fed in.
The concept of using geared rollers to indent paper is not new -- however, existing designs required paper to be fed in one sheet at a time. Our design allows for a single rotation to both feed and indent the card, allowing the customer (or a motor) to continuously rotate the system, embossing a full stack of cards.
Concept to Product
Design Process
Designing the twin embossing barrels was simple in concept but took many attempts to refine. I frequently adjusted the spacing between barrels as well as the extrusion length of the "m", aiming to find a balance between imposing sufficient pressure to create an indention while still having enough space for cards to pass through. Being a 3D printed product, it was easy to create rapid prototypes and test until a balance was found.
The feed system was quite difficult to design. Our initial concept used a simple circular roller fixed to the shaft of the crank arm. However, this led to multiple cards being pushed through at once since our gear transmission system led to the embossing rollers rotating slower than the crank arm shaft. To solve this without redesigning our frame and gear system, we replaced the circular roller with a cam shape and iterated upon that until a good balance was found.
MBoss_Demo.mp4The video above demonstrates m-boss in action. While achieving our primary goal of creating embossed cards with a constant feed, our solution faced a handful of limitations. For the cam to be able to consistently catch the bottom card, there needs to be some level of weight present on the stack. Additionally, rotating the arm was quite difficult at times, leading to concerns that attaching a motor to the arm would cause issues.
Despite some issues, m-boss serves as a strong proof-of-concept, especially given the class-imposed printing constraint of three 10-hour prints. To further demonstrate market viability, I interviewed three local startups to assess whether or not they saw value in handing out embossed business cards. Additionally, I surveyed 50 UCLA students to gauge if they preferred the look and feel of an embossed card over a regular one. Survey results and pictures are shown below.
Surveys & Gallery
