The final project was a success! It was a very detailed project and required lots of time but if the directions were followed correctly there was little room for error. Emmanuel did an amazing job programming it and it ran just how we wanted to after we finished it. This project required a lot of trial and error to get it do exactly what we wanted it to do.

It took me the entire class period to figure out how to hold/use/move the soldering gun in one hand while holding the wires in my other hand.  I eventually figured out how to solder the two wires together but in the process I burned my finger! Actually, I was the only student in the class who burned themselves.  Soldering, even though my experience took pain and a lot of work, is really cool! I liked watching my fellow classmates solder and see their techniques on trying to bind the two wires together.

For our first project, we had to create a motor run robot that could draw.  I partnered with the girl next to me and we decided on making our robot a ladybug, otherwise known as Lady.  We gathered all our material, as seen in a picture above, and started working on our robot.  The first thing we had to do was figure out how to make the robot move.  We attached a small piece of cardboard to make the motor wobble, thus making the robot move.  It took a lot of time and effort but learning how to make Lady move was really cool and interesting!

I hollowed out the eyes on the owls head so i could place the LEDs inside. Once all the pieces had finished printing I noticed that the plastic had warped a bit on one of the sides of the body, so I sawed it down to make it fit better with the other side. I then got to work on setting up a simple circuit on the breadboard for an LED. I did some research and learned how to connect it to the arduino board, and found a code to make an LED blink.

I plugged in the arduino and uploaded the code to it. I was excited to see that the LED started blinking. From there I looked for codes to change the time durations of the blinks and ways to set up circuits of 2 LEDs. I also tried to find ways to position the LEDs inside the head and get them to stay centered in the sockets. To do this I pulled the connective wires through the raft that the owl head initially printed on and taped them down. After fiddling with with it for a bit, I managed to get them to stay inside the head pretty well.

I positioned the arduino inside the hollowed part of the owl, the breadboard under the log, and hot glued the raft to the head. To hold the pieces together I took a bit of the red filament and soddered it between the cracks of the pieces. The plastic melted and then set again, turning the whole thing into one piece.

Video

A few nights later I started working on my final project for the class. I was feeling very tired as I waited for my pieces to print so I came up with the idea to make a pillow. I took a piece of fabric i liked, folded it over so that the inside of the future pillow was facing out, and sewed along two sides of it to make seams. I then flipped it the correct way, stuffed it, and sewed the last seam.  The final product:

It was rather comfy.

TARDIS made with the Replicator Dual, which uses ABS plastic

With the Printerbot I printed a Crest of Hyrule from Legend of Zelda. The Printerbot takes PLA filament instead of ABS, which is thicker so it doesn’t allow for quite as much detail as the Replicator.

Crest of Hyrule made with the Printerbot, which uses PLA plastic

Our class was given the task of using the 3d printers to create a chess set. We chose animals as our theme, and split the class into two teams that would work on either black or colored pieces. I was on the black team and we decided to make our animals mostly mythical creatures. We weren’t allowed to simply print designs off of thingiverse; we had to alter them in some way to make them our own. This is how I got familiar with tinkercad.com which allows you to create 3d designs from scratch as well as edit designs you’ve downloaded. My role in my group was to help people with the animals they were making and print some of them. I help Kallan create her cerberus (our bishop) by duplicating a bulldog design twice, create a hole around two of the bodies so that all that was left were the heads, and then position them on the body of the original dog. I ended up printing the two cerberuses and one of our jackalopes (the rook). I ran into problems with the antlers of the jackalope; I had to print supports so that the Replicator wouldn’t mess up when trying to print the fine details. The antlers ended up breaking off anyway when i peeled away the supports, but I was able to glue them back on. Our final product turned out quite nice! The day it was due we played a real chess match with all of our pieces and I won (with a bit of help from Evan…).

Here’s a video of my TARDIS printing:

click

Sewing turned out to be a bit harder that I imagined and I turned out to be worse at it than I imagined I would be. I had hand sewed things in the past and could do it fairly well. So what’s a sewing machine? Should be easier, right?

Of course not.

I was in the lab with Lindsay at the time and showed her what a mess I had made and she made a reference to a joke from tumblr. The
joke is on getting gold stars for trying even if what turned out was awful or didn’t make sense, the original example is to the left. So Lindsay helped me make it for the other side of the pillow. So of course it looks awful, mostly on purpose, except the sewing. I seemed to get worse and worse as I went on. I eventually had a real life pillow that is completely ridiculous.

The first thing I decided to print was a chubby cat I found on thingiverse.

This first ended in an unknown error and the second’s tail was disfigured. However 3rd proved to be the charm.

I went on to print other things with the PrinterBot, such as this tiny TARDIS; while learning how to use the Printer Interface as well as Slic3r for scaling and editing objects as well as manipulating the printer.

—————————————————————-

Then came the time to use the printers for a project. A chess set. An animal chess set. An animal chess set where our side had chosen the theme of jungle animals. We then learned about programs such as tinkercad, and meshmaker. I was given the task of the knight piece and chose to use tinkercad.

This elephant was found on thingiverse, as well as the sword. I made the base and shield of shapes found in tinkercad.

My partner in this, Maggie, then found time to print them off using the replicator with supports.

And then we played!

In creating my tank top bag, I took an old tank top that I was not wearing and turned it inside out! You can use a tee shirt if you want, all you have to do is cut the sleeves off and cut the neck line to create handles and the neck line cut deeper gives it the style of how a bag looks. The purpose for turning the tank top inside out is because when you sew you don’t want the stitching to show. So when you turn it right side out the stitch will look nice and clean!

When it comes to sewing the machine was already set up for me! All I had to do was align my inside out tank top on the sewing machine and decide the length of how long I wanted my bag to be. I put the presser foot down onto my tank top. The presser foot has the needle in it and when you put the presser foot down you are ready to sew! I started sewing on the edge of the tank top and when I reached about an inch, I held the reverse button which goes over the stitch I just did. I go all the way to where I started and then I release the reverse button and continue to sew! I used my foot to press the pedal, which controls the speed you sew at. I sewed at a very slow pace! When I reached all the way to the other end of the tank top I reversed again for about an inch and went back forward to the end of the tank top. The reverse method is used to secure the stitch and keep the ends strong from not coming loose. I lifted up the presser foot and cut the strings and I just sewed!

I got some scissors and cut the remaining cloth under the stitch that I made. I turned my used to be tank top into my new bag right side out! Ta da! That is what I sewed and created in my FSEM!

Here is my tank top!

Inside out tank top, that I just sewed and made my new bag! You can see that I have not cut the extra fabric off yet.

My new bag and I! I put a box in my bag to show that I sewed my bag perfectly and that it can actually hold things!

There are so many creative and useful things that you can make using 3D printing. As the machines themselves become cheaper and more accessible the community of people creating and sharing their own designs is expanding. The process of printing your own object is simpler then I originally thought it would be. You can either download an object or design your own.

The websites and programs I used (or at least messed around with):

http://www.thingiverse.com/

https://tinkercad.com/

http://www.meshmixer.com/

http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/

From these website or programs I could either find a object to print or create my own.

This “8 bit heart” was the first object I printed. I found the STL file on thingiverse which i downloaded and then uploaded on to another program. This program takes the object and divides it into layers the machine can print.

here’s a video of the maker-bot in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGzf3IMtuvg

Watching an object being printed strangely relaxing.

The class was assigned a project were we had to collectively design and create pieces for an animal themed chess set. The black team took the liberty of designing mythical creatures. My partner and I designed a unicorn knight piece.

We found  horse on thingiverse and uploaded it to tinkercad  where we added a magical horn and a base to stand on.

Building our Hummingbird circuit!

1. We plugged the USB cord into a laptop and into the Hummingbird.

2. You need to go on to the website http://www.hummingbirdkit.com/ and download the virtual board on your computer to be able to have an interactive board.

3. For each port to plug an input into the Hummingbird you will see above the place you insert the input little squares which a diagonal line going through the square. You need a yellow tool (which you will see in my photos) which has a specific end that will fit the diagonal line perfect and you simply place the tool onto the square and press down and insert the input you want into the correct location. You have to use this tool in order to get the input into the board. The Hummingbird has all the sections labeled of what import is for what.

4. We got 2 LED lights and plugged one light into port 1 and the other in port 4, in the labeled section called LED. On the computer we clicked the tab called “Expression Builder” and a virtual board will be on the screen. Locate the LED section on the virtual board on your laptop and select port 1 and 4 which is were those 2 LED’s are plugged into.

5. We got 2 more LED lights, but they are tri color, which means that you can control the amount of red, green, and blue to create your own color. We manipulated each LED color to what we wanted and you can do so by on your virtual board (on your laptop) and you will see a scale and you can increase or decrease the 3 colors to pick what color you want. Watch the actual Hummingbird for the result of the color you are creating! On the same section that we clicked port 1 and 4 for LED, we looked on the virtual board and clicked port 1 and 2 in the Tri Color section.

6. We saved these two step (step 4 and 5) in one section under colors.

7. Once the colors file was saved it will appear on the right side of the screen. Another virtual Hummingbird will appear on the screen for the next operation.

8. We then plugged a servo into port 1in its proper section labeled servos on the Hummingbird.  A servo turns due to a stimulation like a sensor. You need a sensor for a servo to work (keep that in mind, I will get there in later steps). On the top of our servo has a motorized dial that will rotate up to 180 degrees. On the virtual hummingbird, select the servo in port one. An option to rotate the servo will appear, and you can go up to 180 degrees. We made servo 1 rotate 90 degrees. In order to see the servo rotate we attached an LED light to the dial on top of the servo, with electric tape and then plugged it into port 2 in the LED section. Go back to the virtual hummingbird and select port 2 in the LED section and port 1 in the servo section. Then save this, we saved this under servos.

9.  We then plugged another servo into port 2 in its proper section labeled servos on the Hummingbird. An option to rotate the servo will appear, and you can go up to 180 degrees. We made servo 2 rotate 90 degrees also. In order to see the servo rotate we attached another LED light to the dial on top of the servo, with electric tape and then plugged it into port 4 in the LED section. Go back to the virtual hummingbird and select port 4 in the LED section and port 2 in the servo section. Then save this, we saved this under servo 2.

10. In order for the servo to work you need more power source because it requires more power than the computer can give. So you need a power cord, which one end plugs into an outlet and the other end plugs into the motor power part of the Hummingbird.

11. Since you saved the servo 2 already, a new virtual Hummingbird will be on your screen. We added a sound option also. You can pick whatever sound you want or import your own sound! We used one that was an option on the virtual Hummingbird called “woo”. It actually says woo! Once we picked the sound, we saved it under woo.

12. Once we finished with all of our inputs for our program, at the top of the computer screen there is a tab called “Sequence Builder”, click that. Once you click that you can put the files that you saved and put them in the order you want them. We dragged our LED lights over first to the main screen and placed it in the first box.

13. In order for a servo to work you need a sensor. We are using a sound sensor. This sound sensor is obviously used for sound. You scream in it and it will activate the servo on how loud or quiet you are yelling in it. On the bottom right hand side of the scree is a little box called servo. Drag the servo over to the box under the colors square. Since we are using a sound sensor the first pull down bar we selected “sound sensor”. Our sensor is in the first port, so for the next pull down bar we selected port #1. The next bar is for the sound level on how quiet and loud you are. If you pass that blue box you are on the loud side.

14. In the sensor box, we dragged the first file servo named “servos” to the far left one under quieter and we dragged the other files called “servo 2″ and “woo” on the right hand side under louder. We set each servo file to last for 3 seconds for me to scream into the sound sensor and the woo sound for 1 second. So, when I scream into the sensor it will move the servo, and then after 3 seconds the woo sound will go off and the servos will move back to there original position. This is our Hummingbird project!

My group worked really hard! It was a lot of fun trying to figure out what each thing did and how to rationally think what to do next! Hope you like my video and my photos! Had a blast and hope you learned something from my post!

This is the Hummingbird! You can see the 2 LED lights inserted into port 1 and 3 and the 4 wires coming out of ports 2 and 4 in the bottom right section labeled LED. The wires coming out of port 2 and 4 of the LED ports is the LED lights we attached to the to servos. The next two LED lights are the Tri Color LEDs. They have 4 prongs to insert into the ports. The black cord at the top of the picture is the USB cord, which is plugged into the laptop. You can see the top part of the tool which is used to push the little squares down to insert the prongs into the ports. On around the board on the left hand side of the picture is where we plugged the sound sensor in. Above the little squares there is positive, negative, and sensor. Each wire needs to go into the proper port. The next thing is the motor power which is plugged into the board and into an outlet. On around is the two servos which are plugged in at the bottom of the screen.

Here is a complete view of our circuit! The upper left hand side of the picture you can see the sound sensor. To the upper right hand side of the picture are the tools we used to insert the inputs. On the bottom you can see the servos with the two red LED lights taped to their spinner to be able to see them rotate 90 degrees. The black wire to the left of the photo is the motor power and to the right is the USB.

This is a photo of the virtual Hummingbird on the laptop. This is the second tab “Sequence Builder” were the files we saved are put together as a complete circuit!

Sadly I am having a difficult time trying to upload my video:( But I will figure it out! Stay tuned for my next post that will have the video!!

We knew that we wanted a light sensor, LEDs, and we wanted it to talk. We started by plugging in the LED and making it change from red, to blue, to green. We quickly realized that you could have it do multiple colors at once which amused us for longer than I would like to admit. We got all of the expressions that we wanted saved and decided to work on the speech part next. We decided that the light senor, LEDs, and speech would work together; when somebody turned on the lights the voice would say “intruder alert” repeatedly. Once that was done we decided that we needed some way to make it stop yelling at you so we attached a potentiometer. When turned on the voice would say “user accepted” and the light would turn green. We were successful with our project, and managed to get a video of it working. IMG_0008[1]

The main purpose of this project was to design an animal chess piece. Our group decided which animal will represent the chess piece character, we choose turtles to present the pawns. My job in this project was to design four of the turtle pawn. I download a picture of a turtle from “Thingiverse” and using “Tinkercard” i added a base and made some modification to the turtle shell.

      
“Thingiverse”                                                             “Tinkercad”

Printing

After the design was complete, and scale to the appropriate size, the next thing was printing out the pieces. I decided to use the “maker-bot junior”, generally because the turtle piece was not that much detailed. The printing came out pretty good.

Concerning the printing, the only problem that i had was the the leg of the turtle, was attached to the base, instead of it hanging over the base. To fix this problem, i should have created support for the legs. This would have prevented the legs from attaching to the base.

The game

After each team was done printing out their pieces, we had a game of chess between “black team” and “multicolored team”. I was part of the “multicolored team” and we had some good animal chess piece characters. So i think we won the game.

You will see in the completed pictures of the mouse there is plastic under the mouse. That is called a raft. I had to add a raft because the plastic warped and in order for the base to stay flat it needed that extra plastic to force it to stay flat.
The printing process of the mighty mouse.

This is the 3D printer I used to print all 8 pawns called “The Replicator”

Mouse Progress: This is 45% printed

Mouse Completion: This is 77% printed.

The back of the mouse. You can see were it printed part of the helmet.

This is the mouse from the side. You can again see the small portion of what was printed for the helmet.

The finished might mouse! You can see that there is no extra plastic from the helmet because I used pliers and took it all off.

This is the plan! I hope it works! Stay tuned to find out how the printing goes! #pawnpower

My mighty mouse that I created on https://tinkercad.com

My partner, Kallan, and my final product was not our original product. Originally we taped a foam bowl and a foam cup together and that failed. So I worked on the body as Kallan worked on the propeller. The propeller was hard because we had to cut the shape from cardboard and then hot glue the two pieces of cardboard together.

The wiring was the hardest part because I couldn’t get the wires to stay, so I ended up taping the wires inside the cup. I also didn’t know how to use the red and black wiring things. Someone had to help us.

After taping the wires, we taped three markers to the sides to make The Jub- Jub 3000 stand and move and it worked perfectly. But instead of drawing in circles, The Jub- Jub 3000 dotted its way around. It was really pretty.

The experience was overall fun and I would love to hopefully 3D print a better structure for The Jub- Jub 3000.

The work of Chuck Nora’s Drawbot

I did it! I created a drawing robot! I shall call you Chuck Nora.  I got the name from one of the videos I posted… In the background, someone mentioned Chuck Norris, so I did a spin off that (with my own name of course).  This, my friend, is the last of the drawbots… Now on to 3-D printing!!!!

|

|

|

|

|

\/

About 2 weeks ago, we started 3-D printing.  At first I thought this sounded pretty difficult, but once you started printing something, you just can’t stop! It’s like an addiction (but hey, I’d rather be addicted to this than drugs or something worse) — YOU CAN’T STOP PRINTING! When we first started, they told us about this awesome website, called thingiverse.  There are unlimited options on what to print.  There’s anything from a reject federation starship from star trek, to numerous animals like turtles.  There are also a couple different types of 3-D printers.  Here at UMW in the Think Lab, we have three different types: 2 Printrbots, 1 Makerbot Replicator, and 1 Makerbot Thing-O-Matic.  My first couple print jobs were completed on the printrbots, because that was all we knew how to do.

The printrbot in its entirety

The software that is compatible with the printrbots is called prontrface.  It’s really easy and a good starting place for beginners.  All you have to do is connect the printr to the computer, upload an object (easiest to do from thingiverse) and click print!

This is pretty much the whole program. The object you’re printing goes in the middle where the sink strainer is.

My very first object that I printed was a sink strainer that I found on thingiverse.  At home, we lost the last one that we had, and now my mom hasn’t found a good replacement, so I made one.  Hope this one works, Mom!

It’s actually printing!

It was so intriguing to watch as it printed! It was like a bug flying into a bug zapper–you couldn’t help but be amazed!

It’s almost done!

After 42 minutes, my sink strainer was done! Now all that was left was to pry it off the printing block and hope that the blue painters tape didn’t stick to the object.  Luckily, I had no issues during this print job.

The finished product

Since this first print, I have made numerous other objects, which include a turtle keychain, a little robot figurine, a spaceship, and octopi.  There are other stories that go with some of these printouts, but I’ll save that for another post…

Until then,

–Nora

I figured out how to blog!

i’m sorry Dave, i can’t make your blog work

Nothing i have done in this class has been as getting difficult this to work. Seriously I don’t think a computer has made me this angry since hal in 2001 space odyssey .

so thanks Evan for helping me with every all that confusing stuff I still don’t completely  understand.

The purpose of this first project was to create some sort of robot that draws in a random sporadic movement. this was the result.

meet Lady, she is purdy, just like my momma.

the steps to making this beauty were

1.cut the bottom circle

2.cut a hole and glue the motor.

3. unbalance the motor rotate so the body vibrates.

4.connect the motor to a power source(2 AA Batteries)

5.stick some markers through the bottom.

6.give her a hat, because she is a classy lady.

7.profit?

Here is draw bot way cooler than mine.

P.S. As before, i will post pictures when i have my phone’s cable.

We encountered several problems on the way. We began with a circuit consisting of wire, a battery, motor, and switch, with tape to hold the ends of the wires together.Though we were able to get the motor to run, we couldn’t get our bot to move. We cut out a cardboard circle and attached it to the motor as a sort of propeller, but didn’t have much luck with that either. Things improved somewhat when we found a wooden wheel to hot glue to the motor, but our robot still wasn’t moving fast enough and it wasn’t long before we’d drained the battery.

To fix the problem we got a larger battery and a second motor and wheel. As our circuit grew more complicated we began to have problems with loose wires, and we realized the tape wasn’t holding them together too well. We switched to using wire caps to hold the ends of wires together, which worked great. After glueing the switch near the top of the pyramid for easy access and  attaching a cardboard triangle to hide the circuitry on the inside, we were finally ready to set our draw bot in motion.

drawbot_1280x720

We found the pattern it produced interesting because while the draw bot moved in a fairly circular fashion and produced circles with the purple and pink markers, the yellow marker that it pivoted on shifted around slightly, making the central design a bit more unique.

The propeller idea was short lived and not pursued very hard. The fist idea was to have the tip of one motor just touching the table to initiate movement. Also that the motor will be on a switch.

This idea ended up turning into using two wooden wheels, two motors and a larger battery. We started out connecting all theses wires with tape, but found that this was pretty unreliable in keeping the connection; we then turned to those blue twisty things.

The final drawing:

After all the solutions discuss in the initial stage the draw-bot looks like this. The draw-bot was running on a double A battery and the switch was on the opposite side of the battery, compare to the initial stage where the switch and the battery were together.

Work of the Square-Bot

Base on the design of the draw-bot the bot, it was given the name square-bot. The square-bot works exactly how we wanted it to, after all the solutions were put in place. For instance when the square-bot hit something in the process of drawing, it does not stop but rather continue drawing in the opposite direction.

Conclusion

The Square-Bot project was a success, the robot that we design did exactly what it was suppose to do. A robot, attached with makers that move and draw different pattern. Square-Bot was success.

Here you can see a short video of the DrawBot in action, DrawBot Video Shortened

This is a picture of finish DrawBot .

Here is a picture of the finished drawing. I also decided to name the DrawBot the penguin because of its waddle and because it was also flightless.

The next step was to completely redo another bowl. We started by punching a small hole out of the bottom of the bowl. In this hole we hot glued the motor that was to control the spinning plate. Once again, after hot gluing the motor in place, we realized that we should have done the wiring first (one of these times we’ll get the order right!). After getting all of the wiring sorted out we attached a key switch to make turning the spinning plate on/off a whole lot easier. Next we attempted to hot glue the spinning plate to the motor shaft. We weren’t patient enough in letting the glue dry however and turned it on prematurely. This resulted in the shaft basically drilling through the wet glue. We picked that mess off and reglued it, only this time we waited until we turned it on. While it was drying we hot glued that whole bowl to the cardboard platform sitting on top of the bowl that was our base. We then attached four markers to the outside of the bot using large amounts of tape. The tape killed the whole sleek and smooth look we had going but at that point neither of us cared; we just wanted it to run. When we had determined everything was dry and in place we turned on all three motors. It definitely draws! The wobble motor in the base is probably mostly responsible for that. The spinning plate tends to get stuck, but occasionally it catches a second wind and goes whipping around. We don’t think that the propeller on top of the plate has enough power for such a heavy bot to really be contributing but at least it looks good. So all in all I would consider our project a success. We were faced with a few obstacles but we tried our best to overcome them, and if that didn’t work, we completely scrapped the idea.

–N

1st Video      2nd Video

My workspace once the drawbot was completed!

When I started on the second motor, I thought, how am I going to to turn this on once it’s finished? I then realized that I needed to install some switches.. Two to be exact–one for each motor.  That took some time, because I had to figure out how to attach the wires, and then I had to cut more wire, and strip that wire, and yatta yatta yatta…

SO, once the switches were attached and the wheels were attached, I was going to test it out and see how it worked! Well, that didn’t turn out too well because the styrofoam bowls were too flimsy, and my battery/motor bundle weighed too much for the bowls to handle.  So I ditched the styrofoam wheels for some smaller [yet still big enough] wooden wheels.  After a lot of hot glue, and multiple reglue-ings, the new wheels were finally attached! I was done! my drawbot was finally finished! At this point, however, almost everyone had left early, and class was over (I stayed late to finish it), and Professor Meadows had left for the day.  I did have to rewire one of my circuits so the wheel would spin the opposite direction, but it wasn’t very difficult.

My drawbot compared to my pen

My Drawbot!

I had to label the wheels so I would know which switch turned on which wheel.

In my original idea, I wanted to attach markers to the wheels, but once I switched wheels, that plan wasn’t going to work out very well.  So Professor Meadows said that he would bring in paint or food coloring next week so my bot can actually draw on paper!

Anyway, I feel like this post is really long, so I’ll put up the videos in another post

–N

The plan for the constructing the draw-bot was pretty simple. A frame made of cardboard, a motor attached at the bottom of the frame, four markers attached to each corner of the frame and a battery switch box connecting the motor tape on top of the frame.

It started of by cutting out a piece of cardboard and making a hole at each corner of the cardboard. The next thing was gluing the motor at the bottom of the frame. After that the battery switch box was taped on top of the frame.

Problems

The initial idea for the makers was that, when they are placed in the corner of the cardboard, the end of each of the maker will be joined in the middle, but after the motor was attached to the bottom of the frame, the makers were too long for the tip of the motor to touch the drawing platform.

After some adjustment the tip of the motor was finally able to torch the drawing platform, only to find out that the motor had too much power and therefore was spinning on it tip too fast to make out any drawing.
Another problem was that the motor was too balance therefore the motion of the drawing were not random.

Solutions

To make this draw-bot a success, the 9V battery powering the motor will be change to a AA battery, which in effect will give the motor less power and that will cause the motor to draw properly, also the motor will have a rubber thing at the bottom that will cause it to be unbalance.

The object of this project is to make a robot that can draw or paint when placed on paper on the ground. My idea when I started was to have two wheels, spinning in opposite directions. My hope was that this would cause the drawbot to spin in some nonbalanced fasion.

This  is a rough idea of what I had in mind, and granted that it was done in Paint, the colors represent the markers, and the motors are not shown at all.  I started with a handful of markers, 2 styrofoam bowls, 2 motors, and 2 batteries.  After playing around with the motors and batteries for a while, I started to think, how was i going to connect the two bowls with motors that spin opposite directions? I ended up poking a hole in the middle of the bowl and attaching the motor spindle here.  I added a circle of cardboard to make the bowl stay on the spindle.  (When Iwas just playing around with the motor running and the bowl attached, it spun so much that the bowl actually flew off the motor!! 

By the end of day 1, I had about half of my idea completed.  One bowl was attached to the motor, and now I know a little bit more of what I’m doing, I can quickly finish my drawbot tomorrow and start testing it with markers!

Later,

–N

The final motor design.

That theory proved false. I ended up having to tape several pieces of cardboard together to make it heavy enough to prove anything. In order to make sure it wouldn’t come flying off I applied generous amounts of hot glue. That was the beginning of my career as the hot glue master of our project. I glued the motor into the bottom of one of the bowls, and after settling on a AA battery to power it, glued that as well. As soon as it was glued down we realized we probably should have waited until we had the wires hooked up. We attempted to hot glue the wires to the battery but miserably failed. We then decided that maybe easier was better, and simply put a a rubber band the battery and slid the wires inside of it to complete the circuit. After checking to make sure everything was working we poked a hole in the side for the key switch. Evan stripped the wires and attached them to the switch. When we turned it on our poor little motor shook everything so successfully the wires shook off of the contact. We fixed this by adding tiny drops of hot glue on top of the rubber band. So far that seems to be keeping it in place. Then we moved on to the propeller. We started by hot gluing the propeller to the shaft since at high speeds it liked to go flying off. After that we created a stand for the propellers motor to sit on out of cardboard rectangles taped together. I then proceeded to hot glue the motor to the stand, and then to hot glue the stand to a cardboard disk that would eventually be our spinning platform. For the battery we decided on a AA since the 9 volt would be too much power. We stuck it in a battery holder and proceeded to glue that to the cardboard disk as well. We left room in front of the battery for a switch to control the propeller. We decided to cut a little hole for the motor to stick through in the top of the bowl that would be the top of our bot. We quickly realized that wiring would be an issue with the spinning motor below. That problem was quickly solved by cutting a circle of cardboard and hot gluing it to the the top of the bowl.  Now that we didn’t have to worry about any wires getting tangled in moving parts down below we went overboard. Both of us decided that brighter was better. As a result the top of our bot now has a ring of 5 lights giving it a UFO feel. The motor that powers the spinning plate is also hooked up to a key switch. This will make it much easier when we attach the top bowl to the bottom bowl, since we won’t have to worry abut accessing anything inside of them (granted everything works). We discovered that all of our lights draw too much to be powered by a single 9 volt battery. Tomorrows goal is to get all of our lights working, and our bot actually drawing.

3 motors, a 9 volt battery and a key activated switch.

However, we quickly realized a few changes would need to be made. First off, the motor that spun the propeller plate would need to spin much slower. So we slowly started reducing the battery size until we finally reached a tiny little LED laser pointer battery. Once that had been sorted out, Cecily figured out how to make the wobble motor. She made a wedge of cardboard. She then taped on 3 more layer of cardboard the the end of the wedge to create an unbalanced motor shaft. Once connected to a battery, this little motor had some serious wobble! In fact, it had to much and we were afraid that it would rip apart the machine we were building. So we hot glue gunned the motor to the bottom bowl, offset to one side, and began to test lower and lower battery sizes. We finally settled on a single AAA battery.

The wobble motor glued to the bowl.

We glued this to the bottom the the bowl next to the motor, and then realized we probably should have tried to attach the wires to the battery before gluing everything down. Our first idea of hot glue gunning the wire to the battery failed miserably, but then we simply put a rubber band around the battery and slid the cords inside so the rubber band would hold the connection. Once everything was working, we poked a whole in the side to fit the key switch (i accidentally poked the first hole in the wrong place so i ended up poking a second one, but shh, i’ll put a light there later). Stripping the motor wire and another scrap piece to bridge the motor to the switch, then the switch to the battery was simple enough, and wen tested, everything worked, but it would cut out randomly because our wire connected to the positive side of the battery would shake off the contact. We didn’t have time to fix this, but we did have the idea of soldering the wire to the batter to maintain a permanent contact. Also in class, we manage to get the propeller plate working. We first hot glue gunned the propeller to the motor shaft because at high speeds it liked to take off. Using the box cutter, i cut out a circle of cardboard made a stand of sorts by taping together multiple rectangles. We then hot glued the stand to the circle and the motor to the stand. Now for the battery, we randomly picked up a AA battery knowing the 9 volt was too powerful, got a battery holder, and glued that down behind the stand. The plate was now mostly finished. We left room in front of the battery in case we decided to add a separate switch for the prop. Sadly, this was all we had time to do in class, but our drawbot is slowly taking shape, and Cecily and i are going to the  Think Lab tomorrow to possibly finish fabrication so that we can test and make minor tweaks in class on Thursday. Well, that’s all i have to report this evening, but here’s a final picture of all we accomplished today. Thanks for reading!

We had our minds set on one idea, using 2 bowls one on top and one on the bottom, in between the bowls we decided to put cardboard so it could have a better support system. We cut the cardboard in a circle that was larger than the bowls so we could put the markers all around the edge of the cardboard, for the drawing part. We had our idea, but we found it difficult to know where exactly to put the motor and batteries which you need to make the motor work. Out first plan of action was putting holes in the bottom bowl and have the motor sticking out of the bowl and put the batteries in the bowl. That plan was quickly demolished. We came up with another plan. We decided to put the motor on top of the cardboard and run the wires under the bowl that would be on top. We then ran into another struggle. How do we get the motor to the cardboard, the batteries to stay together and the wires to stay united with the battery ends which are connected to the motor? Easy, we hot glued the motor off of the edge of the card board to a popsicle stick make sure it wouldn’t come off. The popsicle stick gave the motor the support it needed and for it to be able to move easier. We taped the batteries together, put a rubber band around the batteries, taped the wires to the cardboard, put the wires that are connected to the motor through the rubber band and we had power!!

Two girls that have no idea what they are doing just did the unthinkable! But, the celebration was put to a halt because we realized that it wasn’t moving. We needed to put a propellor on the motor. Of course, there were no more propellors left. Our luck. We grabbed a wooden wheel, cut popsicle sticks in half, hot glued five of them on to the wheel, and then hot glued our girl made propellor to our motor.

Guess what?! You guessed correct, it worked! It doesn’t move like we need it to but we have movement! So todays class was a huge step for mankind, okay well for Sophie and I. I am so proud of us! Stay tuned in for your next update on our drawing bot!

Our first plan of action, to put holes in the bowl to fed the wires through and have the motor stick out. Fail.

The propellor is attached to motor and the wires are taped down.

The bottom bowl is taped underneath the cardboard.

Sophie and I with our creation after it sort of moved!

My design is pretty simple, but says something about me. I decided to make a rotating propeller driven one.  Since I’m an aviator, I thought that the use of propellers would create interesting results.

So far my initial design has worked, but I did add some little tweaks to help support the motor mounts by adding rubber bands around the cup and around to hold the mounts. I have had a few issues with the wiring of the electric motors, mostly just trying to connect differently wires together that look like they were supposed to be plugged in rather than twisted together.

 So this is essentially my sketch of the draw bot. It is a little bit of a hybrid of a few that I saw online, but it will be able to make circles and move around randomly.

I got pretty far on it today only needing to secure the batter, switch, finish wiring, and to attach the markers.

So the first post is supposed to talk about our background to 3-D printing which also will include the use of tools, engineering principles, and computer design. I am well established in all of those areas. In High School I was enrolled in the engineering classes where fortunately I had a very involved and innovative teacher. I was able to take; Introduction to Design, Engineering, Architecture, Computer Animation and 3-D Design, and CAD I. I was introduced to the AutoDesk Suite of programs such as their base program AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and 3DS. The best part of the class was when we were able to get hands on and try to build some of the things that we had made. It also gave me the opportunity to take charge on some projects. I spearheaded the designing of home made wind turbines and also try to make a tin-can Stirling engine. Hopefully I can get around to posting some of those things to this website.

I have always been pretty handy with tools and figuring out how to make or fix stuff, but when things went wrong I would always try to figure it out. So over the years I have built or fixed my fair share of things everything from soldering wires back together to building a hay shed.

It will be interesting to put some of these skills back to use in this class and learn some new ones with the 3-D printers.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:38767

the plans for a case that fits a mobile Pi-to-GO system. Now i’d heard of the Raspberry Pi system before. It was a micro computer with nearly unlimited capabilities. A project idea almost immediately started to brew. I followed the idea to the actual creator of the Pi-to-Go system and his blog (see link). His instructions seemed simple at first glance, and in an excited mania i began to research parts. After a few days of searching, i thought i had located everything but a higher resolution screen (which Nathan Morgan, the owner of Parts People, had himself mentioned wanting), and i took a look at the actually putting it together… and immediately scrapped that project. The intricate wiring required messing around inside laptop batteries and soldering that could fry not only the Raspberry Pi, but the screen, keyboard, SSD, and nearly every other part of the project. So i started looking around for another Raspberry Pi project and stumbled across another project:

http://www.instructables.com/id/LapPi-A-Raspberry-Pi-Netbook/

This also was way to complicated for my current skill set and started to become disheartened. Would all cool projects be too technologically advanced for my current self? Would i never find a project that was simple enough for me to do myself, but still advanced enough to be exciting and interesting. I started to give up hope. But then i found one.

http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi/blog/2012/09/08/raspberry-pi-laptop

Yes, a Rasberry Pi laptop that’s not made of wood. I got very excited at the initial prospect and even more excited when i found out the total price of all the parts was just shy of $200! That’s nearly $150 les that the Pi-to-Go! So i have finally found my project. Once all the parts arrive and i can begin putting it all together, i’ll make another post with a parts list, some pictures of it being put together, and some feedback on the difficulty. So for now, i bid you all adieu.

Here is a video of something make from Thingiverse that i thought was really cool. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRU2ZG2oULU

It played basically no role at all until the final project. When doing that, my lack of creativity was crippling. Working with others in the group helped in that regard. Other than that, the majority of the work I did was on my own or with the help of Dr. Meadows.

In what ways, if any, did “trial and error/failure” process support your learning? Provide two to three best examples.  What was you your take away about the process?

There was certainly a lot of error involved on my part during the course. In a very non-scientific way, I would just quickly try different things until something worked. This applies to 3D printing, seeing how different sensors react to various things, etc. It was frustrating at times, but I eventually just accepted that I would probably have to try a few different approaches every time for almost anything I did.

In our class we (professors) have structured the course around class processes to support your learning related to design, creativity, collaboration, and problem solving. What did you find the most personally meaningful to you?  Once you have identified the aspects that were the most meaningful to you – what connections, if any, can you bring to learning?

I definitely feel that I had a great opportunity to be creative, maybe too much of an opportunity. I personally like assignments that are more specific/structured and feel that I probably would have become more experienced with the various things in the ThinkLab (Arduino, 3D printing, woodworking, etc.) if I was assigned (forced) to use them. More specific assignments could potentially make developing design skills and collaboration with classmates easier, though it might also make the class less enjoyable for some people.

One trip to Dollar General later, I had the ingredients for my project pudding. I used hangers, duct tape, a tri-fold presentation board, Christmas lights, and a few things from the trusty Think Lab.

I made lateral slits in the cardboard and stuck the hanger heads inside, then  duct taped the front to make it look prettier and hold them in better. Then, using a dremel tool, I cut a sign to let everyone know that the beautiful piece of art they’re viewing was made for shoes, not for their dreams.

The  Christmas lights were a little tricky, only because some of them would blow out in the process.  I ran one wire connecting all the positive ends after cutting the lights into sections for fours, than a wire connecting all the negatives, hooked them up to a 9 Volt battery and….

Collaborating with fellow students played a huge role in creating my projects because a lot of times there would be things that I didn’t quite remember or we didnt quite discuss that my peers would have had the same problem with. One example is for my final project when I was trying to make my arduino work after uploading the code. I didn’t realize the exact placement of the pieces is needed for it to work and so Desiree helped me with that because she had had a similar issue. Another example was with the car and trying to get the motors to work. One of my classmates had already finished and helped me to solder the wires to the motor to keep them attached.

1. In what ways, if any, did “trial and error/failure” process support your learning? Provide two to three best examples.  What was you your take away about the process?

Trial and error played a huge role in some of the things we created. Personally, trial and error in  3-D printing was very helpful because I consistently did it throughout the year. Having to figure it out myself helped me to remember how to do it better.  An example would be the first time I printed. I generated the g-code for the wrong machine and it didn’t come out right at all. That’s how I realized the g code is specific to the machine used. Another example would be when I was trying to print for my final project and the edges kept lifting up. Thats how I found out you need to change the plastic on the platform.

1. In our class we (professors) have structured the course around class processes to support your learning related to design, creativity, collaboration, and problem solving.  What did you find the most personally meaningful to you?  Once you have identified the aspects that were the most meaningful to you – what connections, if any, can you bring to learning?

Allowing us to collaborate an providing a open work space where we could freely ask questions was especially meaningful to me. I really appreciated how the professors were always willing to help. I also appreciated being able to talk to my peers and ask questions without worrying about disrupting class. It made it less intimidating to see that the professors were learning with us and genuinely interested in what we had to say.

For my final project I wanted to create something elegant and beautiful that displayed what I had learned throughout the year. Knowing the project was due right before winter break, I decided I wanted to make a winter wonderland. Using 3-D printing,motors, and arduino I did just that.

My Project

HERE’S HOW

3-D Printing

Originally I wanted to make a winter wonderland in Antarctica, however as I was searching on thingiverse for things to print I kept stumbling across beautiful buildings that I wanted to print but didn’t have a reason for. That and countless reruns of Elf led me to create an ice skating rink in new york city, a modern take on a winter wonderland.

From thingiverse I downloaded numerous  building, sized and exported in makerware, and printed them. One of the problems  I had while printing was remembering to generate the code according to the type of plastic I was using. To be honest I didn’t even realize we had different types of plastic until I realized a print worked with the gray filament rather than the black because of the type of plastic it was. Another issue was left side of the prints would keep lifting up. I later learned that the yellow tape on the platform needed to be changed in order to rectify the problem.

Arduinos

For my winter wonderland I wanted to make it festive by having a speaker that played  a popular Christmas tune. The arduino company provided a code that directed the speaker to play certain frequencies which correlated with certain music notes. However, they only provided the frequencies for one octave. I couldn’t figure out the frequencies for other octaves because I noticed they weren’t scaled evenly between each note. This posed a problem because originally I wanted to for the arduino to play Jingle Bell rock, however Jingle Bell rocks has music notes spaning over 3 octaves so I couldn’t program it with the template provided by the arduino software. Instead, I decided to program Jingle Bells into the speaker. I found sheet music online for the recorder that was somewhat easy to read. Unfortunately the sheet music spaned over 2 octaves. However, having previously played the clarinet, I knew that Jingle Bells could be played over the span of one octave if you started at a lower note. I decided to use the sheet music so I could know how many beats I needed to make each note last and change the notes by starting the song on e rather than b. For the most part I changed the notes correctly but I messed up a little bit towards the end of the song.The comments in the template helped me to figure out which parts of the code I needed to tweak. When I loaded the code onto the arduino I encountered a bit of a problem making it work because I realized that the circuit wasn’t entirely correct. I realized that everything needed to be in a certain place in order to make it work correctly.

Motor

Evenly balancing the ice skating rink on top of the motor was a challenging task.  I tried many different ways of doing it but non of the seemed to work. This video gave me an idea for doing it.

watch?v=XKEBZGXp7bk

I decided to superglue a platform to the motor and then glue the ice skating rink to the platform. It was a little unbalanced so I raised the ground level of the buildings to provide for support for the rink.

Decorating

In my opinion appearance is 50% of creating a piece. You can have as much technology as you want on it but if it isn’t visually appealing it won’t gain the full attention its worth.  Due to the limited amount of time left after finishing programming, printing, and balancing. I decided to buy a white sheet with glitter on it from the dollar store to create the effect of snow. The same could have been easily done by stringing out cotton balls and spreading glitter on top of it.I also decided to accent the snow by making the ground level black. To make the tree I stripped copper wire and coiled it around a pen the shaped it in the form of a tree.

2. Most of the wiring I did took a lot of trial and error. Trying to make transistors and relays work was something that took a lot of trial and error. Also, 3D printing is very hard to do right the first time. After doing a lot of prints, I gained knowledge about which settings to use in what cases that may have been hard to obtain otherwise.

3. Building my final project from the ground up was the most meaningful thing I did in this class. I feel that it was a valuable learning experience because it taught me about the difficulty of creating something of your own from scratch. I think this is a useful thing to have learned, because I will be able to better estimate the amount of work that will have to go into a project, depending on the starting point.

The step of creating my vehicle I think my first error was not calculating how much weight the vehicle could be, before being too heavy for the fan to push. From this I had learned that the wood board that was used for base was entirely unnecessary and could have been done without and I could have used a lighter base preferably plastic. From this I had decided to just develop just a fan boat as I had discovered that the program that I had uploaded onto the arduino had made the vehicle move in the similar quality as a real fan boat.

In addition, the program and wiring of the arduino was also an issue, as I came across the issue of somehow getting the correct wiring but, then the program would be incorrect. Then when I had entered the correct code, the wiring was of course incorrect. Which taught me not to mesh different program I had found on Google with wiring instructions from other sites. Eventually I had found the correct wiring on the instructables site and later on I had discovered the correct wiring for that program, which I think I had lucked out on finding.

From this class the most meaningful feature about it was that I could be creative with whatever project I was making, without the bounds of always following exactly what the instructions said. Which I can say would be the ability to express my creativity with anything I was making. I find this important from what I had learned from this course as I found it difficult to find any course that allowed me to express myself in anyway and always had made me follow by the book, which anyone can honestly say is no fun at all. But, this course had this distinct quality about it and I hope that I will be able to sign up for another class such as this.

Collaborating with other students was really important in creating projects. It was difficult to remember each detail about each program and what to download, so it helped to work with other people. Learning to use the 3d printer took help from students in the class, as well as the working on the cars and chess piece.

The first project the class did, the cardboard automatas, had a lot of trial and error because my group each had different ideas to get the gears working to make something move in the box, and we failed at least three times.

I love to design things using creativity and collaboration. Problem solving, including all the different programs required on my computer (plugins etc.), were difficult to manage, which is why it helped to have students working together.

I enjoyed being able to work with my classmates. I found it to be able to bounce ideas back and worth off of each other. It was also very handy when I didn’t understand something, to just ask a friend to explain it to me. One great example of this is when I was figuring out my arduino board. Jack is an absolute PRO at them, and he sat down with me and walked me through how to use one. Another example is when ever Desiree would help me work the printer bot.

In what ways, if any, did “trial and error/failure” process support your learning? Provide two to three best examples.  What was you your take away about the process?

I LOVE trial and error and this whole class was basically based off of it! If you failed in this class instead of giving up you found a way to fix your mistakes and move on. One great example was when I was working on an extra credit project; my toy laser gun. I failed, fixed, failed, fixed, and ended up with a working laser gun to go along with Campbell’s Halloween costume. Another example is again the arduino board. I failed so much at this, but after learning from my mistakes, i was able to fix and understand my arduino. My take away is that failure is a part of learning.

In our class we (professors) have structured the course around class processes to support your learning related to design, creativity, collaboration, and problem solving.  What did you find the most personally meaningful to you?  Once you have identified the aspects that were the most meaningful to you – what connections, if any, can you bring to learning?

I really enjoyed that this class wasn’t easy. We had to fail in order to understand how to work something. We learned from our mistakes instead of being given all the answers and solutions to how to fix/make/design a certain thing. I believe that being able to right your own wrongs helps with learning tremendously.

1.Well, I definitely don’t know everything, so having a class full of students working on the same/similar projects can be extremely beneficial. From just asking the person sitting next to you what they were material they were using to asking for help on a specific issue I wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if not for my peers.

3. I feel like the most important is problem solving and persistance in problem solving. I think this class has taught all of us to work hard at our respective projects. I think the other processes are important as well but they were a little more blatant, like here use your creativity to design this collaboratively. But we actually worked hard at the projects without being told, “just keep working, don’t give up!”

1. To what degree and in what ways did collaboration with your fellow students play a role in creating, revising your projects? Provide two to three best examples.
2. In what ways, if any, did “trial and error/failure” process support your learning? Provide two to three best examples.  What was you your take away about the process?
3. In our class we (professors) have structured the course around class processes to support your learning related to design, creativity, collaboration, and problem solving.  What did you find the most personally meaningful to you?  Once you have identified the aspects that were the most meaningful to you – what connections, if any, can you bring to learning?

Again, I don’t want you to feel like this is a major paper because it isn’t. You will only be given a pass/fail grade for this so as long as you do it you get an A. It’s very important to us that you give us specific examples of scenarios, projects, etc. that relate to what you’re talking about. You don’t need to link to anything or embed photos, just write openly.

Thanks for a great semester!

I’ve gone through many ideas for what to make as my smart project, but I’ve finally settled on one: smart gloves.

These gloves will have sensors in them that when struck will cause the gloves to light up and maybe make a sound.

it will be some sort of impact sensor, maybe a pressure sensor. it’s intended to activate when the user claps, snaps the fingers, or high-fives.

I will be making this by sewing Lilypad Arduinos into the gloves, along with a few LEDs and conductive thread.

Conductive thread can also be sewn into the fingertips to make them useful with touchscreens.

Front view of the HMS Handsome Devil

After sawing out my hull, I glued on foam marshmallows to aid in flotation thens et about attaching the fan to a marshmallow to raise it above the hull and secured the battery on the deck with velcro and built a ship-like housing for it. The wires were a pain to connect often fell off of the battery until recently when I was able to solder them on and create a very simple switch where you wrap the wire around a nail that is wired to the battery. Improvements forthcoming.

After letting my little craft chug along the work table I noticed that it always rotated to one side and so trimmed some of the hull to even out the weight. My final step in the design was to add the outrigger platforms using dowels, glue, mallows and craft wood. I also wanted to make it ‘smart’ by adding lights with a sensor and a miniature motion detector fog horn, though have had little succes as the only places available to put these pieces are on the outriggers and the wires are too short/ I am not allowed to solder them….yet.

View of battery in housing and annoying switch (small black thing on deck)

As you can see, The Chariot was not very…functional. This design flaw was unclear to me at the time of building. I thought “Oh wind power would work, and it will be eco-friendly!”. Now, I’m trying not to get my tears of laughter and short circuit my laptop.
Then I tried to do something I call “The Skateboard”. There is no photographic proof because the farthest I got with it was two popsicle sticks wrapped in electrical tape with a wheel on either side. The battery pack was too heavy and kept flipping the board over. Out of frustration, it was destroyed before I thought to take a picture. My bad.

Here is the current state of my car, my personal favorite:
Thank God I am not a mechanic. Stay tuned for the newest update!

The issues I had with this piece was the resolution, and coverting it. It did not come out as clearly as I wished it would, which was probably due to the fact that I used the Thing-O-Matic instead of the Replicator G (which also took a lot longer than I wished, but hey, it worked). Also, taking something into sketch up and trying to convert it to an STL file to print took me way longer than I planned. I ended up using Makerware which ran much more smoothly.

The only other problems with the print were the lightsaber as it was very skinny and thus very fragile and had to be glued on and the support material which did not all break off cleanly, leaving some jagged edges. I was impressed by the quality of the helmet (an import from the Thingiverse) on such a small scale.

The nub of his cape and his oddly printed elbow joints are visible here.

Designing the Base in Sketchup

This was a quite the hassle because initially I tried to add 3-D text to the base. However when exporting to a cae file that could be recognized by blender the words became unattached to the base and it was hard to rescale and select them in blender. I finally decided to just use the rectangular prism.

1. First I added a rectangular prism to the platform

2. Secondly, I exported to a CAE file. The default, skp file, wasn’t recognized by blender.

Molding Items Together In Blender

Once the student aide showed me how to do this it was so easy. However it definitely isn’t a self explanitory process.

1. First, I imported all of my files. (The man, the sword, and the base)

5. I repeated the process for the base layer.

6. I exported the fie as an STL file.

Printing

Printing also proved to be a tedious process. Not because it was hard, but because multiple people had to print and were  just learning the as well. I had some issues exporting to an sg3 file for the makerbot, so I decided to print directly to the thing o matic.  I later found out that you have to change the machine to the one that is a dual extruder whe trying to use the makerbot. Also, in replicator g, scaling is something you have to kind of eyeball. The first time I tried to print, my guy turned out to be too small and it broke while I was on my way to my dorm. The following morning I woke up early before I had to go to work and printed again. This one came out a good size. The only problem was the sword was stunted and the base was a little too big.  Problems that didn’t appear in the design. I still havent figured out why that was.

As you can see, we took all the pictures in front of a pink bed sheet. We thought the solid color in the background would make it work better.

I uploaded the pictures  to 123D catch and after 4 failed attempts, they loaded. Once the model was created, I had to manually match up shared points from picture to picture to finish and perfect the model.  This may not seem like a big deal but it absolutely sucked.  I had the phenomenal idea to put a pink sheet up around the bathroom so that 123D catch wouldn’t have to deal with the background. This turned out to be a pretty terrible idea. Because of the solid color background the program had a tough time finding shared points in each picture. So the majority of my pictures had to be manually matched up.  During this time, the program froze up and “was not responding” like 20 times. In addition to the crappy program freezing up, my computer shut down a ridiculous number of times.

After I realized that it wouldn’t work, Tim, one of my teachers, told me that he had the 123D iphone app. So I put my hair in buns, got the heat gun, and headed out to the parking lot. After we took the pictures, Tim uploaded them into the program and sent me the file.  Back  in my dorm I spend a lot of time cleaning it up, taking out the background, and such. I realized that I didn’t know how to do anything useful with the model though, and I asked Tim to help me out. So we imported my 123D catch model and put it into MeshMixer and after making a few tweaks to the model, uploaded into Tinkercad where we added a platform. Finally we uploaded the final product to ReplicatorG, made the code and printed it.

It’s not perfect but it will have to do. Check out princessrayceleste.com in the near future for a blog about 3D printed TIARAS! DO IT.

It kinda looks like the Virgin Mary holding Jesus :/ It’s actually me dressed up like Princess Leia though.

(Picture taken in Google SketchUp)

This blue box was my mortal enemy. I absolutely could not take away any one part of the model without deleting the entire object, no matter what 3D design program I used. This made adjusting the arms, the one thing I said I felt I could easily alter in my previous post, nigh impossible. After a few hours of battling my angular azure foe, I gave up on that completely.

To make up for my failure, I decided I would try to make the base of the model a little bit interesting.

Ignoring my poor artistry and design skills, sort of cutting or pushing away material in SketchUp is easily doable with the basic tools you have. If you’re reading this, have an interest in 3D printing/design, and haven’t used the program before, I highly encourage you to download it and just figure out how to do basic things like this on your own. I felt reasonably proud of my base, but the 3D printer I used wasn’t having any of that. I’ll elaborate on that a little later.

The print itself was basically the same as in my earlier post on the red alligator. Quite a few file format conversions were necessary to get the model from SketchUp to the printer. I’m honestly not sure what all I did, but I know I have my model saved in eight different file formats. I’ll post the easy, simple way to accompish the same thing the next time I need to print something… hopefully.

Post-print: After breaking away the support material (and an arm) I was left with this mummy-like creature. The pictures really speak for themselves. The work I put into the base was also completely undone by the support material. Although my model turned out horrendously for the amount of time I put into it, I know the mistakes I made will not occur in my next print.

the ruined model

I was able to adjust the model a lot faster the second time. I managed to get the model manipulated nicely, and then I put it in Makerware.

I had some trouble removing the feet from the model, so I decided that I would just position the feet below the printing platform before I printed it. I had also given up on filling the model, so I printed it without doing that. Both of these decisions resulted in a strange print. Instead of not printing the feet, Makerware just popped the model back above the printing platform. I opted to print with full external and internal support. Because the model is hollow, the inside of the model is printed as support material as apposed to being printed with the hexagonal pattern of a solid object. This resulted in a much more dense object that took a much longer time to print. I’ll now post some pictures of the finished print for your viewing pleasure.

I think it turned out pretty well, all things considered.I am very pleased with how well the hands turned out, and the model makes a good chess piece even with the feet.

Creating a chess piece of a star wars character for this assignment was honestly the most difficult compared to the previous assignment, as there were more steps such as altering the original design on Google sketch up, converting the design into a gcode on replicator g, and then finally achieving the final product by inserting the gcode onto the program ” Maker ware”.

Which I think could have taken less time if I played around with a few of the programs but, seeing that I found Google sketch up comfortable to use for the step of designing, it didn’t occur me how many program I would have to use in order to get the final product in order to print my design. 

From editing an already existing design I learned that it’s not as a simple of a task as i thought before. As I had figured out how many steps it took to simply just move a single portion of a figure and how time consuming it can be as well. The main conflict that I had encountered were the arms of darth maul as if moved too much to one side the arms formed irregular segments that just didn’t work and the most I could get the arms to go down was a fifty degree angle, any lower the figure of arms came out to be too misshapen.

After completing the design I began printing my design but, to my dismay all the prints in progress somehow always came off the platform while printing and it took me quite a while to play around with the print settings on replicator g before actually receiving a successful copy of my design, which I found it worth it as I learned most of the print which I found it worth it as I learned most of the print this conflict.

This one came out just fine.

but the new few I tried ran into problems

[pictures of the spaghetti messes go here. i'll add them later.]

The initial problem was that the legs were too thin and broke off during printing. Now that I’ve thickened the legs, the base isn’t staying on the platform and is moved around by the extruder. I’m still working on it.

Here’s a thing that lets you spin my model around:

So the pawn for our chess set has finally been created! We ran into some troubles printing it out, but out professor was able to help us troubleshoot and fix the problem, and we were able to print it on the Thing-O-Matic. It only took about a 50min to print (not all that long in the world of 3D printing, patients is a vertue). Anyway, I think it came out pretty awesome. I do wish the base was a little flatter, but I couldn;t figure out how to do so. The “cut-plane” option on the program cut a flat plane into the sculpture, but it was at a random angle that I couldn’t seem to change and it ended up cutting through the figure’s face instead of the base. If any of you have some suggestions, maybe how to open a .stl file into Sketchup? That’d be great.

Here are some pictures of what we got

Here is our little guy fresh out of the printer. The support material we used was actually pretty thick, tweezers weren’t cutting it. I had to use needle-nose pliers to get the job done. When doing something like this, be careful – but don’t be afraid to use some elbow-grease.

After all the support material was cleaned away, it looked pretty cool. The details on the mask were visible but not incredibly clear.

I saw someone else in my class use a sharpee marker on their piece, so I decided to do the same. All in all, I think he’s pretty sweet.

Now, being that my team is The Sith for this chess set and darker colors are usually associated with evil things, we are the black set. Plus my little storm trooper is the pawn, and chess sets have a bunch of those. Basically, I needed to make a bunch of these guys with black filament. Using the multiply setting on Replicator G, it was really easy to do. No issues arised while printing for the first time. Horray for progress!

Here’s that we got:

Any comments or things you think may make this little guy even better? I’d love to hear back!

I have gotten one of my two chess pieces completed: Chewbacca!

The design is very rough and I did play around with Mesh Mixer a little bit. It’s a download that can help smooth out edges, add or get rid of certain areas of the model, and more things that I have yet to discover. However, I did use one of the tools to attempt to smooth out his head some. It didn’t work as well as I would have liked it to.

He looks extremely blocky and has holes in his shoulders. On the good side, there were no printing issues. Everything came out well. There are a few loose strings but that’s not that bad. I have used Sharpie to add in details such as his fur and ammo belt. 

It’s printing now.

In constructing my peice the first thing I had to do was research my person. This video gave me a quick 2 minute run down of the situation. Star Wars rundown  After watching this it was clear why he was selected to be a night. I decided that his light saber definitely needed to be included in my chess peice to show off his skills.

The first method I tried when constructing my peice was using the shapes on sketch up. However, it looked blocky and it didn’t really look like much. Then I researched a way to turn a 2-D image into a 3-D one in sketch up. However as you can see,  that method included a lot of angling and was too complicated for someone like me who’s just starting out on sketch up. http://support.google.com/sketchup/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94920.

The third option I considered, which I am currently working on, is taking a figure from

ninjinx

thingiverse  and morphing it in mesher to make it look like Luke Anikan. I would also add a light saber to the figure.

Pawns- Ewaks
Rooks- R2D2 and C3PO
Bishops- Han Solo and Chewbacca
Knights- Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi
King- Yoda
Queen- Leia

I think it’s pretty obvious which character I immediately jumped to. PRINCESS LEIA!

I have to admit, I am not nearly far enough along on the project to blog about it but I have I have started and I have a plan on how to finish.

To start, I looked up pictures of Princess Leia on google images. While it was helpful to remember some of the key Princess Leia moments, I wish there was a way to specify in my search that I did not want pictures of sleazy comic-con girls with low self esteem wearing the Jabba the Hutt slave girl costume. I decided to play around with SketchUp in the hopes that I could master it to make a Princess Leia. I lost my patience with SketchUp though so I decided to turn to a different route.

Tim told the class about 123Dapp.com so I looked into it. So far, the hardest part has been convincing my suite mate to dress up like Princess Leia for me. She finally agreed to it and so I put her hair up in buns on either side of her head and my other suite mate (who owns a really nice camera) took a ton of pictures of her from different angles.

I have not uploaded them to 123Dapp.com yet (mostly because I don’t want to read the directions/sign up for an account but also because the pictures are on my suite mate’s computer) but I plan on doing that Monday evening. I’d like to have my rough draft completed before class on Tuesday.

The unfortunate thing for all of you faithful readers (my teachers who are stuck reading/grading this and my best friend, Kasey) is that I don’t have any cool pictures or screen shots of my progress thus far. ):

I think the hardest thing is probably going to be changing my suite mate’s face to look more like Carrie Fisher. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pull that one off. But rest assured that AS SOON as I have a general idea of what my chess piece will look like I will post a picture.

As I don’t want to bore you with a lack of pictures, I will put a few up- just for fun! I’m not sure how to take pictures off the internet without breaking some law of copyright so pulled some pictures from muh facebook to show y’all. (:

My beautiful cousin, Ruth Lammers likes to take pictures and I like to have my picture taken so it’s like a win- win with us!

Photo cred: My super cool cousin, Ruth Lammers (:

Photo cred: John- John Stevens, biggest Batman fan I’ve ever seen.

I hope you enjoyed these pictures! Maybe they (paired up with my superb blog sarcasm) will convince you to keep reading my blog and keep checking out my website.

From all of us here at UMW, I’m Ray Celeste Tanner. Stay classy, Fredericksburg. (:

ForestPL of thefree3dmodels.com did a much better job than I could have. If nothing else, my failed design experience has given me the knowledge of how I can edit and build off of this model for the chess piece project. For example, adding a base underneath C-3PO’s feet and changing his stance seem relatively simple to me now (of course, other changes will be made as well). However, I’d like to see more pictures of my classmates’ designs before I do too much more editting. Detailed information about and pictures of my changes to ForestPL’s model will be posted after that.

I went on to thingiverse.com to see if someone had already decided to make a little Yoda, lo and behold someone had. “BonsaiBrain” made this Yoda figure that seems perfect for a chess piece. Unfortunately it wont be that easy. I do have to add my own extra designs to, including a base and a crown to recognize that he is the king piece.

I am still an amateur on sketch-up and its been difficult to actually get anything really designed.

The first thing I did was look online to try to find a 3D model of Sidious. I ended up finding a pretty good model of Sidious in the Sketchup 3D warehouse.

This model is very good, but it still needs some adjustments in order to make it into a printable model that makes a good chess piece. The first adjustment I attempted to make was to lower his arms.

This took a lot of work to do, and a lot of trial and error. I next need to rotate his hands correctly or remove them, remove his feet, smooth the backs of his arms (which have strange polygons sticking out from them), and fill in the model so that it does not print hollow.

In addition, the challenges that are faced when designing the figure on sketch up using the exploder tool isn’t the only challenging task for this assignment. I also have a conflict with the detailed features that I have to attend to like the limbs of the figure as being already pre-designed from 3-D warehouse it’s a challenge to figure out a method where I can place the limbs of the figure where i want them to go. But, is a process I am still under going to figure out with different methods such as exploding but, is more challenging I find it as it just makes more components for me to toggle around with, which is honestly a hassle and time consuming and convince me more to find a more effective method to move limbs to the designated locations I chose to place them at.

This is the raw design out of 3-D ware house that I am currently altering in design. My goals are to remove the cloth portions of this figure of darth maul as I figure it will be a conflict with printing if I do not remove it now in the process of design, As for it being cloth, My guess would that it might print out in a fashion i did not hope for it turn out.

This is not a gift though, it is our class project. We are making a chess set: Star Wars themed. There are two teams, Jedi and Sith, and each person on a team is

making a type of chess piece. I am working on making the pawn for the Sith, can you guess what is it? Yup, a stormtrooper.

By: State Farm

Even if your not a fan of Star Wars you have probably seen or at least heard of these guys. There’s a ton of them in the movies, so it seems fitting that they represent our team’s pawn.

We are all still getting used to the 3D design programing, so our team decided that instead of making a whole standing figure (as cool as that may be) we would make busts of our figures. A bust is basically just a sculpture of someone from the shoulders up.

I originally started out using a program called SketchUp, but it was difficult to get the details of the stormtroopers mask. For instance, the basic shape of the mask is not a perfect circle, so I changed to a different program that would allow me to use less geometrical shapes. I switched to this program called MeshMixer, which simply starts you out with a 3D sphere of ‘clay’ (as I like to think of it) which you can pull and smooth infinitely. It’s great, the only trouble I have with it is that you can’t cut away at your object. But other than that it is super easy to use.

Right not my game plan is to essentially free draw this stormtrooper bust just from referencing a photograph. So far it is turning out pretty cool. It still need to be worked on more and fine tuned, but I’ll be sure to post photographs of my finished design!

Until next time,

~Desi

Just as I was making a cat figurine as a gift for my Grandma, I made an Imperial Class Star Destroyer for my mega Star Wars fan brother. I printed it using the Thingomatic, printing the top and bottom halves separately. My plan was just to glue the two halves together, but my first issue arised when the file name was not showing up on the printer. With some help, I was able to troubleshoot and eventually get it to work by writing the Gcode directly onto the SD Card. Dragging and dropping wasn’t working. Once it was printed, I was all ready to smack the two halves together and finish this really awesome gift!

Until…I remembered I was a perfectionist. Especially when it comes to gifts. When I was a kid I would spent a solid 5 minutes writing a friends name a birthday card envelope to make sure it was centered. That’s just for an envelope. With something like this, I really want to make sure it’s cool.

When I fitted the two pieces together it became clear that during cooling the corners and edges of the ship curled up, which was kind of an issue in my book. I took the halves back to my dorm that night and my friend and I tried to melt down the edges with my hairdryer. We ran into a few issues with that, from burning our fingers to the plastic not melting enough…we gave up on that tactic by the end of the night.

Fortunately however, upon hearing my troubles one of my instructors was able to get a heat gun for the classroom! For all of you reading who are unsure as to what a heat gun is, click that little blue link. The Internet is a wonderful thing .

The rest of this procedure I kind of made up as I went along. I learned that by putting the piece on a block of unpolished wood would prevent the varnish on the table I was working on from bubbling up and melting (learned that the hard way). I set the heat gun to a medium-high temperature, and it only took a few seconds for the plastic to become soft and pliable. Much better than the hair dryer. The plastic wouldn’t melt completely (which is a good thing) but because of that I had to press down the edges. Problem: it was really freakin’ hot. So I used what I had on hand, another block of unpolished wood. Basically I would heat up the plastic and then use the block of wood to press it down, and repeat until it was completely flat. It worked wonderfully! Since then I have glued the two halves together, and now have made a really cool

Jack’s Action Figure

I’m on the black side and have been assigned to make a knight piece in the form of Count Dooku. After being given his character, I figured that my little brother, Jack, at some point in his Star Wars phase, must have gotten an action figure of him. He did!

Screen shot of the model made using 123D Catch

Using the Action figure and 123D I was able to make a model of Count Dooku (image on the right)

The way the program works is, I took 25 photos of the action figure from all around it, then uploaded the images and the software then made a 3D object out of the 2D photos.

However, for some reason it didn’t make the back of the figure so it’s flat :( But the only chess pieces that can move backwards are pawns so I guess it doesn’t matter too much if the back is flat ;)

Using 123D, I cleaned up the edges and deleted the background that the software originally made part of the model. The tools in the program actually made it pretty easy to delete the excess and smooth the edges.

Next I just have to download the 3D image to open in sketch up to make a base, then print it! Very close to being done, hopefully it all prints out okay.

For the most part, I haven’t had any major issues making my pieces. While making Chewy, Sketchup closed on me becuase of an error of some sort and I had to start from scratch making him, and another time I was trying to save him and when I opened the file later, Chewy had been deleted. I haven’t had any issues with my Obi Wan piece.

As of right now, my models are still quite blocky and look sort of like Legos. I am going to attempt to make Chewbacca’s head a little more rounded. 

Alright so I’ve begun 3D printing…and it didn’t go as well as I would have completely liked.

My first print was going to be of a cat, a simply little kitty cat with not much detail or complexity. Here is an image of a succesful print of it, printed by my instructor. My attepmts at printing were a tad less impressive…if not freightening.

Here is my adventure. I encourage you to click on the links along the way for the full experience:

I was in the ThinkLab afterclass one day because I figured it was about time to start to try making. I had already known at this point that I wanted to print a gift for my grandma. She loves cats, and when I saw this “lucycat.stl” file on Thingiverse.com I thought it was cute and simple – perfect for a first crack at the Replicator. I had downloaded all of the programs I needed to create the GCode my laptop, ReplicatorG and Python 2.7.4. I transfered my GCode to an SD Card, popped it in the Replicator, and started making my grandma’s gift. A couple minutes pass and everyone has left the room. I’m minding my own business doing Chemistry work when suddenly the Replicator stops right in its tracks. I walk over and just stare at it for a bit, not really knowing what is happening and ready to hit the off switch just in case all hell breaks loose. The nozzles move to the far right corner and the platform with my half printed cat begins to rise until it was pressing and cranking againt the conveyor belt mechanism. Problem. I turned it off. Not really knowing what to do at that point, I left a note on the machine and emailed the professor – then left. I came back to class with my professor the next morning and we tried to print it again, this time with a raft (base of plastic, seen in following image). The print come along a little father – then the same thing happened. Problem.

Two headless cats. Not the ideal gift for a grandmother.

So I tried again. The machine didn’t malfuncion as it had in the past! Horray! But the bottom of the cat came loose and moved around on the stage as plastic was still being extruded. I didn’t notice at first and so…this happened… yeah…

As you can see, I created more of a speggetti cat at the end of the day. Once more, not an ideal gift for a grandmother.

I am going to print another cat, or at least attempt to, sometime this week. My teacher has no problem printing it. The ThinkLab is full of these things….various complete ones made by my teacher, and headless ones fit for halloween created by me. There everywhere, scattered on the tables. It’s kind of funny how a print so simple turned into something so… not.

TechED

Printing it was a difficult for my first try. It was quite the process but I was happy when it came out. I am still in the process on untangling and sorting all of my earrings on the holder.

It turned out pretty well, but with some errors in printing. This is because the settings I used to print it were the ones that were used on the last print. The setting that messed up the print was the shells setting, which was set to 3 instead of the default of 1. Because of this, the finer details, like the 2 in the upper right corner of the print, didn’t turn out so well. If I were to redo this print, I would print with either 1 or no shells.

I chose to print this alligator because of its small size and fairly simple design. I think it turned out well for a first print, though I hope to make more interesting things in the future.

http://umwthinklab.com/category/makerbots-and-mashups-fall-2012/

It consisted of a cardboard box, rubber bands, tape, wooden sticks and hot glue. My cardboard automata was meant to show the sun and moon rising and setting out and in to the box. 

The cardboard automata worked somewhat well, however, it could be improved with sturdier materials

Making the coaster was fairly easy. I just downloaded it and opened it on Replicator-G, proceeded to shrink it just a little so as to save time, generated the g-code and then it started to print. There was not a single problem with printing, however, the coaster itself doesn’t really function as coaster considering the amount of spaces in the leaf.

My lovely leaf coaster and cup of tea

Error - could not find Thing 26234.

Luckily when I went to print that is precisely what I got, perhaps a little less detail due to smaller size, but still what I was expecting!

To start, I decided to make a bracelet, nothing too difficult or fancy.  I found the model on thingiverse.com and pretty much just hit print. 

The person who originally posted this included all their recommended settings so all I had to do was follow directions.

After I made sure everything was how I wanted it, I started to print.  

It was actually a pretty cool process. The little nozzle moved back and forth to create the little zigzag lines.

This is what it looked like as it was finishing. It took a total of 28 minutes to print this bracelet.

The bracelet printed very well and was super easy to make.  And considering I have a new piece of jewelry that people are amazed by, I’d say this project turned out incredibly well.  What’s next for me to print? The obvious: a tiara.

Singing up for my freshman seminar class I had no idea what “Mashups and Markerbots” would entail.  All I knew was that I needed another class on Tuesdays and Thursdays sometime after 3:15.  Imagine my surprise when I found out that the class title with a typo really meant something cooler: 3D printing. Now imagine my even greater surprise to find out the second day that we were to make something out of cardboard.  Yes, there were very few directions for this first assignment.  Just make something out of cardboard… and it has to move.

Most people started working on their “cardboard automata” by looking at well made ones online and then drawing out exactly what the box would do, how the box would do it, and what the box would look like. I, on the other hand, decided to start making the box without a single idea in my mind.

The first parts I made were gears. I figured I could probably figure out a use for them while cutting them out. After they were made I attached them to wooden rods and put them together to see how they’d work.

Unused gears

After about 10 minutes of playing around with them to see how I could incorporate them into the box, I decided to trash the idea all together and go for  new idea.

My next idea involved a few rods and two circles. I first cut out two circles of the same size. I then poked a hole through both of the circles off center, towards the top and another hole through both circles towards the bottom. I put a rod through the top holes so that the two circles were connected.  I then hot glued the rods to the circles to make them sturdy/stable.  I then stuck the other two rods into the bottom holes. I then hot glued them in, outwardly.

This is essentially what it looked like when I was finished.

I’m not entirely sure what my box will do or how it will do it, but expect pictures and a followup to the blog as soon as I have figured out how to finish my box.

Overall the spaceship came out pretty well, and from distance looks pretty uncanny. Upon closer inspection, you can see the individual threads of the gradient pretty easily and there is a stray thread hanging under the bridge. It was a two part model, which, allowed for some more intricate details such as the docking bay on the bottom.

At present, WordPress will not let me select pics from my laptop to upload so I will try to add them soon!

Using the website thingiverse.com our class found things to print, I made a bookmark shaped like a ghost! You can find my thingiverse profile here.

I printed this because I really love to read, so it’s practical, and it was the coolest looking bookmark design I could find.

and spent a ludicrous amount of time fiddling with the sword.

It’s a whole lot easier to keep track of polygons if you color them.

Here’s Mario in the making. If you look carefully you can see that it is a profile shot of him in the MakerBot machine; he looks a little odd because there is support material surrounding him, making him almost into a cube. After filing away the support material, I got this…

So it’s not awful, but it’s not perfect. The fingers, because they were so small, broke off when I was filing away the support material ( and led to me breaking his leg a little bit when trying to get some of the raft off, blame Bowser). Next time I would print a bigger version, without a raft, and maybe with less shells. Not a bad first project at all, but I can’t wait to get better!

I ended up with pieces that were super fragile and probably weren’t launchable. and they took a long time to print.
So in order to have something all in one piece to show off to the class, I printed out this nifty little robot guy.

Also, while exploring Thingiverse, I stumbled upon this aweseom thing called Action Chess.
I hope to print it out in the future.

I also hope to get the full version of the launchable rocket and to launch it.

The printing that I made is the Orbit Love Charm. The inner piece moves along the inside of the outer piece and rotates on the x-axis. It is about 1/4 inch in depth, an inch and a half in width, and and inch and 15/16 in height.

I did not have any issues in printing either pieces; everything went really smoothly. I made it because I enjoy charms like this and made it green because it’s my favorite color.

I look forward to being able to make another printing.

IT MAKES NOISE.

The Box is actually a cardboard Automata, which is a pretentious way of saying that it moves around. Turn a little knob on the side and the box will produce beautiful music.

To make this box, I used cardboard, foam board, a guitar pick, and a ukulele string. The mechanism that creates the wonderful noise is a stationary string plucked by a pick traveling along the circumference of a circle.

In order to get good acoustics, we chose a deep box and cut a soundhole into the top.

The sound hole had to be adjusted because the pick collided with it when it was at its highest point. This resulted in the asymmetrical shape of the hole. I will be uploading a sound clip of me playing “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen on it.

Edit: I lied, because .3gp files are not supported by wordpress and I am lazy.

I wanted my end result to be a Pegasus whose wings would flap up and down and whose head would rear in the opposite direction. Sounds fancy, but really all that would take would be three dowels coming through the top of the box with one moving up with the other two move down. Not too difficult. But my issue was trying to line up the cogs with the dowels. So I settled for two moving dowels, and transformed my elegant Pegasus onto a butterfly.

Now, the challenge was to get the parts to move. Challenge accepted. I made these ‘cogs’, and the reason for those quotes is that they don’t have teeth. They are simply circles which radii decreases as you trace the circumfrence. When strung though a dowel and tunrned, they will move just as a regular ol’ cog.

Instead of teeth interlocking, the plan is for another dowl to rest onthe edge of the circle. As it spins, the dowl will trace the circumfrence and when it reached the littlt dropoff, and thus drop the wings.

They are each constructed of two pieces of carboard glued to a piece of styrofoam..just to make them super sturdy and a little wider so the dowel will have more to rest on.

Now, I could use a little advice…

What are your thoughts on how to keep the dowels that are resting on the cogs and are strung thought the top of the box (ultimately connected to the butterfly wings) streight? On other words, how can I prevent the dowles sliding off the cogs while keeping the holes in the top of the box large enough for the dowels to easily move?

-Desi

Well I certainly had no clue what it was until about a week ago. I’m this course called “Makerbots & Mashups”, and when I signed up I couldn’t tell what it had to do with until I walked into class and saw these large complex looking machines called, well, makerbots. These things let you print in 3-dimensional objects out of plastic.

Interested? Not fully understanding what kind of course I’m in?

Either way, check out my progress in the course here at my new subdomain! Cool stuff is on the way people! I’ll keep you posted!

I was born a victim of northern European genetics, not built for the warmer climes of the Mid-Atlantic and scrawny in the truest sense of the word, so when handed a box I hoped to be able to combat both hereditary problems at once; I would build a hand powered fan.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rkfionn/

I envision the finished product to resemble an old timey farm windmill sitting atop the box frame with a hand crank on the side to power it. I have begun cutting out cardboard gears (super reliable!) to connect the hand crank to the shaft and blades. Hopefully the poor quality of the construction materials will yield more resistance and so make my arm work out all the more challenging.

Once I get bored of working on the gun show, and I almost certainly will, the project has the potential to be powered electronically and using better aligned gears via the Replicator.

So far we’re still trying to find the best way to have up and down motion, before we even add a flower to it.

So basically we have a a box, some wooden sticks (two of which are tied together) and some cardboard circles and squares. We’ve tried  a few things so far. It’s a Work-in-Progress.

Anyone have a suggestion or advice on up and down motion?

I cut two ( very messy ) parallel holes in either side of the box, and inserted a wooden spindle our lovely classroom had lying around.

Then I printed a photo of a dog, attached him to the wooden spindle and added a hoop made out of a plastic cup and hung it with a rubberband and tape.

  
Tada! There’s my project!

This week in Makerbots and Mashups we’ve been laboring over our first project. The task, you may ask? Cardboard Automata. Our goal was to create an apparatus, constructed from cardboard, that would move in some way. Personally, I wanted to create  a mechanism that would be both aesthetically and mechanically pleasing.

In doing so, my partner and I decided to make a flower pot that would both retract and extract flowers as a crank was turned. Unfortunately, we found that this was easier said than done. Intially, we’ve tried using a pully- like system made from cardboard and rubber bands, but we ran into issues figuring out the resistance needed to be able to retract cardboard. We are still currently in the process of finding another system to use in our pot.

I drew up a kinds of cool concepts for my cardboard automaton that I would love to share, but unfortunately the paper fell into the bottom of my backpack and was ruined, so that’s not going to work out. I can share, however, the only one that really matters, which is this one:

I looks pretty good on paper, but as I discovered while attempting to construct it, it’s physically impossible. Solid objects would have to pass through solid objects.

So I made some revisions on the fly and it ended up like this:

The rod suspending the top wheel had to be halved and there could only be one connecting rod.

But in the end it’s still basically the same machine, and it works the same way, in theory.

In practice, it doesn’t work quite as I had intended.

The foam is very flexible and bends when it should be pushing. Because of this, the top wheel only turns halfway rather than all the way around. when we revise our automatons, I’m sure it will be fine because we’ll have better materials.

Our first project was to create a cardboard automaton. Each design is unique in its concept and function; some move pieces, make music, or a combination of the two. Certain designs and builds went far better than others.

The automaton that I designed is supposed to have two sections moving at the same time. The first section consists of two plastic cups sitting on top of the box with a “mallet” in the middle. As the crank is moved, the mallet is supposed to beat on the make-shift drums. The second section has two bells attached to pieces of a skewer and one should beat against the other, thus creating simultaneous high and low tones.

My design has had flaws that I am still trying to over-come, such as getting the mallet to beat against both drums. The bottom of the mallet moves back and forth but because of the lack of solid foundation, the top just wiggles. I was sort of able to find a solution by doubling the amount weight at the top to balance out the weight distribution. Another design flaw is that I cannot move the crank in a full circle, only back and forth. This can also be a benefit, allowing me to control the speed of the mallet striking against the drums and the bells against each other.

This project is still a work in progress but should be complete in the next few days.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have added a widget on our course site right under where you need to be adding your link that displays who has done this. No hiding now. If your blog isn’t listed there no one is going to see your work so please make sure to do this over the weekend.

I’ve seen a few of you dropping by the ThinkLab to do some work and that’s great. Please keep in mind that 3D printing even small objects can take up to 30 minutes. There are 16 of you. If you wait until Tuesday it is likely you will not get this done on time. Our student aide, Alice Watkins, has hours in the space on Monday from 2-6pm so I encourage you to make use of her expertise when printing your item. Also think about taking a photo of your object while it’s printing, or even video. Good stuff to have for when you’ll blog about the print later next week.

As a side note I found a great WordPress plugin that let’s you embed the things you find on the Thingiverse directly in your site. It’s a great way to show off links to what you print. The plugin is called “Thingiverse Embed” (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/thingiverse-embed/) and you show items in your blog post by using what are called shortcodes which are specific codes surrounded by brackets like [shortcode 123]. When you activate the plugin you can embed any thing by finding its number (which is in the URL to the thing) and typing in your post [thingiverse thing=1234]. So if I wanted to embed myself (which can be found at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:27881) I would put [thingiverse thing=27881]. Here’s what it looks like:

Untitled by timmmmyboy

This thing brought to you by

Have a great weekend!

Students, working alone or in small groups, came up with a concept for what they wanted to accomplish. Once they decided on their concept they began cutting and assembling a variety of materials including cardboard, styrofoam, tape, rubber bands, and glue. The resulting machines may seem basic but the cognitive work it takes to conceive how these parts move together is fairly advanced for the first 2 weeks of the course. And what’s great about this project is that as students learn to use more advanced tools like the 3D printers and robotics they can add on to these machines, fine tune, and automate them in ways they couldn’t have dreamed possible!

Here are a few photos of students assembling their projects. Over the next few days we’ll see them blogging about their projects in more detail so keep an eye out for that as well.

int main()
{
cout<< “Hello World”;

return 0;
}

WordPress How-To

Installing WordPress was pretty easy, right? Hopefully you’ll find the options it gives you quite straightforward. We’ll be showing you in class how to write a post and add things like photos and video to it. You should also think about making this blog unique to you in some way, whether that be through a different theme, images, or maybe a few plugins that you find. A great resource for some of the basics on the WordPress tools (minus the setting a blog up on UMW Blogs part) can be found at http://umwblogs.org/support/wordpress-guide/.

Makerbot and Thingiverse

This week you’ll learn about some of the 3D printers we have available in the ThinkLab. 3D printing isn’t a new concept, but the drop in cost with consumer models like the Makerbot has moved it from the world of expensive industrialized applications to the realm of hobbyists and consumers. The Thingiverse is a website where people go to share the files they have created and download the work of others. It’s as much a community as it is a resource for you so we’ll be asking you to create an account where you can keep track of items you’d like to print, things you have printed, as well as items you’ve designed and uploaded. By next week you’ll all have downloaded an item and printed it on one of our Makerbots that represents something about you. We’ll share these items in class and talk about them next week, as well as blog about our first steps into the 3D printing world.

Your To Do list for this weekend is as follow:

• Write a blog post detailing your Cardboard Automata project. Talk about what problems you had and how you overcame them. Make sure to include photos of the finished project.
• Create an account on the Thingiverse.
• Download and print one small item from the Thingiverse that represents something about you. You will be asked to talk about it in class next Tuesday.
• Use the “I printed this” option on the Thingiverse to upload an image of your item.