What are some ways to fixture devices relative to other devices?

Tools
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For example, optical breadboards (e.g., ThorLabs), fiducial markers (e.g., AprilTags), custom printed or machined bases.

What has worked well, what has been more difficult, and what are some tips and tricks you have to share? Any specific examples?

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As a chemist new to making things, I have been using the optical breadboard from Thorlabs because it provides mechanical support for fixed arms and precise positioning for repetitive workflows.
I am also open to vision-guided systems because they allow more flexible workflows and straightforward calibration.
I wonder if there is any work comparing them.

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For our (UBC-Ada) solid dosing platform, we waterjet-cut custom aluminum mounting plates for all our instruments and secured them to aluminum extrusion as our deck. For a large deck (1m x 1m) this is a more affordable option than an optical breadboard/tooling plate, but it only works as long as things are secured and someone doesn’t reposition the plates. Since it is on extrusion, this is not great for instruments that need to be removed and replaced regularly as you cannot guarantee you’ll put the plate back in the right position (though, you can mitigate this by designing hardstops, visual markers, etc.). But it does give the advantage of fine-tuning the position of your instruments if you need to.

For our system we never really have to replace the plates, and even if we need to service the instrument we can usually remove it while leaving the plate fixed on the deck. And to make sure we know that nothing has shifted, we marked each bolt with bolt marker (this also helps us see if vibrations are causing screws to get loose).

We have used tooling plates like the one on the North Robotics N9 and those are great (except that they powder coated the plate after they tapped it, so we had to retap all the holes…). We couldn’t justify the cost for such a large area though. However, we did space our extrusion so that we could purchase Vention’s tooling plates if we wanted to have it in particular areas on the deck in the future.

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