Automated wire stripper and cutter

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Over the Thanksgiving day holiday, I knew I had a bunch of harnesses to build. Rather than being a good corporate steward and actually building them, I instead built a machine to automate the first of the 3 time consuming parts of the harness construction: wire cutting and stripping.

This was just thrown together from two cosmetically damaged moteus devkits, a Raspberry Pi 3 an old development version of a pi3hat, a hand wire stripper, two synthetic rubber bands, an off the shelf 24V supply, and a bunch of 3d printed parts.

Why?

Simple automated wire management at the DIY level is not new. It’s been done many, many, many times before. YouTube has decided that every day I need to see someone else’s take on the problem. Look down in the resources at the bottom for my collection of alternate solutions.

What differentiates this version is (1) I built it most from junk parts I had around, (2) since it uses brushless motors it can be both very fast and very precise. Here’s a clip of it executing a few cycles where it strips 3mm from the front end, pre-cuts 3mm from the other end, then cuts the wire to a total length of 5cm. The overall cycle time for all operations is around 1s per wire for the 30cm wires I needed right now.

By replacing the guides and doing some tuning, it should be capable of managing wire between 30 AWG and 18 AWG, although to date I’ve only tested it on 26 AWG.

It did take a bit longer than the weekend — I printed a second revision of everything early the following week, then waited for a panel mount switch to make the power supply look more professional.

Video

Here’s the overview video, with some more shots of it in operation.

Resources

The BOM, .3mf’s and source code are in github at https://github.com/jpieper/bstrip. There is a hackaday page here for discussion: https://hackaday.io/project/176211-bstrip-wire-cutstrip

Maybe someone else will find it useful?

Other DIY-style solutions