Figure 1: Initial 3D assembly of of the spoon showing its axis of rotation
Initially the servo motor would be placed sideways in the handle (see Figure 2), and we changed this to account for the space needed for the worm gear system.
Figure 3: Our initial gear mechanism before switching from worm gear to bevel gear
The initial prototype was modelled simply in Inventor, and constrained (without any real-world logic) in order to test the axes of rotation that the spoon could have. This concept rotated in 2 axes, which we decided was beyond the scope of the project.
Figure 2: Initial 3D model for the previous handle design.
The worm gear system did not end up making the cut, since there were rotation restrictions on the servo motor and with a worm gear the spoon would have a very low range of motion compared to using bevel gears.