A Simple Motorized Turntable

A couple of weeks ago I had a final presentation for a product design course. The final presentation included competition in which every team of students had to present and sell their designed product - the winner team is the one that sold the most products.

Each team had their own booth, and we could design it however we wanted. One of the ideas we had for the booth was a small, motorized turntable to display our product on. There are many great designs online and even Instructables for such turntables but due to lack of time we needed to design around components we already had (didn't have enough time to order stuff).

Machines/Tools:

1. 3D printer & 3D printing filament - I've used regular PLA
2. Soldering iron & solder
3. Wire stripper
4. Side Cutter
5. Metric Allen wrenches

Materials/Parts:

1. (1) TT motor - A very common motor for DIY projects, can be found on Amazon, Aliexpres, Etc.
2. (2) 2xAA battery holders
3. (4) AA batteries
4. (1) On/Off toggle switch
5. 2c 24awg wire - I've used ~50cm
6. (2) M3x30mm button head hex driver screws
7. (4) M3x10mm Countersunk hex driver screws
8. (6) M3 Heat set inserts (OD 4mm L5.7mm)
9. (8) M3 spacers 3mm Long
10. Can be replaced by stacked washers, 3D printed parts, etc.

Extras:

1. Laser cutting machine capable of cutting "soft" materials (wood, acrylic, cardboard)
2. Any material you want for the display surface - I've used 3mm MDF
3. Inkjet printer for printing a label
4. Sticker paper

I designed the turntable using Fusion 360

1. Free for hobbyists
2. Easy to use without extensive CAD experience
3. There's a built-in McMaster-Carr interface which makes working with COTS hardware so simple
4. There are tons of plugins and add-ons available - like the one I used for the spur gears

I started with a basic sketch to define the kit's size and the overall structure, than started creating a component for each part:

1. Outer Cyliner
2. Base
3. 16t Gear
4. 40t Internal Gear

For the COT items (screws, nuts, spacers) I used the McMaster-Carr interface

I have assembled all components and started working on the text & graphics, this can be done using either Fusio360, Adobe Illustrator, CoralDRAW, etc.

Lastly, export a DXF file for each part, make sure to include the text & graphics

3D print all the parts, I've used standard PLA filament on my Prusa Mk3S+ with my default settings:

1. 3 walls/perimeters
2. 30% infill
3. 5 Bottom & Top layers

1. Use a soldering iron to install the heat set inserts
2. Assemble the parts like seen in the exploded view images

You can use additional heat set inserts and screws to mount the battery holders to the printed parts, in my case there was a great fit between them and it wasn't necessary.

The wiring is pretty traight-forward:

1. Connect the 2 battery holders in parallel
2. Solder the 1st wire directly to the motor
3. Solder the 2nd wire to the toggle switch, take another wire and connect the switch to the motor

In order to stylize and customize the turntable I laser cut a circle from MDF to serve as the surface for the objects and printed a label and wrapped the cylinder with it (I have designed a couple of options, printed them all and chose one).