Parametric Iris Mechanism (Variant 5) – Fully Customizable Design Tutorial

This model was originally uploaded to GrabCAD a few years ago, along with several other variants of the iris mechanism I’ve developed. However, due to a community rule I'm not fully aware of, it was reported as "tainted" and is no longer publicly accessible without a direct link. That said, I had been meaning to create a tutorial showing how to design the mechanism and its leaves from scratch.

This particular design was created during the pandemic period, when I took a few SolidWorks courses that left me unsatisfied. As a result, I started developing my own parametric templates for a variety of iris mechanism models—and this one is part of that effort.

The variant presented in this video features leaves that include a sliding slot mechanism. Each leaf both rotates and slides depending on the motion pair driving the system. The rest of the assembly remains consistent with my previous parametric designs.

This assembly is a design I developed to create iris mechanisms in a way that is parametrizable in several aspects, such as:
The outer diameter of the entire mechanism
The number of blades that can be created (I’ve tested from 4 to 7 blades with some adjustments to the blade opening angle)
The maximum opening angle per blade

There might be some constraints I haven’t fully considered, such as the opening angle per blade potentially needing to be less than 30 degrees when the number of blades is 7 or more.

In this proposal, I present a method for generating the blades of the mechanism through the specific overlap of components.

Original GrabCAD Link:
https://grabcad.com/library/iris-gene...

Updated GrabCAD Link:
https://grabcad.com/library/iris-mech...