Work In Progress 2015/2016

[Dr. Pyro]

Well Yggy, I guess I know what you'll be having us do the last weekend in June.

[lucky420]

Well Yggy, I guess I know what you'll be having us do the last weekend in June.

Better get some crocs...

[mgb327]

Or at least some crayfish......

[trilobyte]

Awesome stuff, Yggy! I added a /2016 to the thread title - since this thread hasn't been that much of a hotbed of activity lately, I figured we didn't need to split 2016 into a separate thread like we do with the bar.

I know I've been slacking on posting my projects here, but will try and do better at it now that build season is upon us. Over the last few months a lot of my camp projects have been in the 'bar napkin' or rough sketch phase of design, and in the last month I've been working on refining and finishing the designs, then building and rendering 3D models. Not just to get a better sense of how things will look, but also to make sure all the parts I plan on making will fit together.

Over the weekend, I tinkered with the model for the new camp sign - I wanted to play around with 3D printing a 1/10 scale model of it using some glow-in-the-dark material we've got. It was a little tricky to set things up at first, as my girlfriend had switched over from the old software we had been using to slice up the model and prep the design files to some new thing called Cura. The new app is all kinds of slick, but takes some getting used to. I took my first crack at printing it last night...







As you can see, it's far from perfect. I made both the top/bottom faces a little too thin, and so you can make out the hollow internal bits. I also had the extruder (the "print head" that heats up the material it's using to print) a little too hot, which led to a couple spots where the glow-in-the-dark material's color is a little uneven. I've made a few changes to my settings, and am giving it another go today.

[ygmir]

good call on the title change Trilo!
and wow, cool printing and idea!! what a great machine.
Sort of on the other end of the spectrum from my life, of 4 lb hammers and rock chips, saws and logs, welders and plasma cutting.......

[trilobyte]

Thanks, and yeah 3D printing is pretty cutting edge. Here's the machine in action, so far so good on the new piece...



I wish I had the kind of space and the tools to be able to weld and do some plasma cutting though.

[ygmir]

so cool. I've never seen one!!

[trilobyte]

I've done some more tinkering with the 3D model and come up with a first attempt at a pendant design.



I say tinkering because it was more than just adding the little hole for the cord or chain to go through. Since I'm sending it out to be printed someplace else, the design had to meet certain requirements so that their machines could make it. it took me a few revisions to get something that passed all the checks with flying colors, and I ordered one in plastic and one in stainless steel to see how it comes out. Unfortunately I have to wait a couple weeks to see the result, but I'm excited nonetheless!

[trilobyte]

Semi-annual computer cleaning this weekend! If you don't do that on your own gear, I highly recommend it at least a couple times a year (4 or more times a year if you've got smokers or pets that shed a lot in the house). Crack open the case and bust out that air compressor (or a can of compressed air from the office supply joint) and give it a good blast. Dust is the enemy of electronics, since it basically acts as an insulating layer that makes all the things it coats run hotter (or if things get really nasty, blocks airflow). And when electronics stuff runs hot for too long, it fails. Yesterday morning I unplugged everything, cracked, that case, and gave it a good blast.


Then, since my machine's got a shiny surface I gave it a good cleaning on the outside


and then it was time to plug back in all the things....


After putting the compressor away, it was time to get to work on a project I've had on the back burner for a while. If you can see in that top picture, my computer's got a circular fan inside it and the hot air gets blown out through the top. Air gets pulled in through the bottom. It works absolutely fine just sitting on my desk (and believe me, the machine is running 24/7, often with all 12 cores running at max/turbo capacity as it's working on a render).... but I've been toying with the idea of some kind of stand to lift it up and off the ground. I've had several ideas bouncing around in my head for a while, but this weekend I wanted to start working on an octopus stand idea.

After checking the measurements of the base, I wazzed up the idea in C4D...


...and got it looking like this.


From there I ran the design through Netfab and Cura to prep it for the 3D printer and create all the CNC code for that machine. Then it's off to the races for what will be a fairly long race...


The picture probably seems pretty weird. That's after about an hour or so, the bits with the grid are insides of the octopus' tentacles, and the stuff on the outside of that is a sort of scaffolding. As the printer creates the piece going from bottom to top, the scaffolding will be there to support the tentacles and other bits that don't have anything underneath it. 3D printers are magical, but they don't have the magical ability to print something floating in the air

Anyhow, yeah, I said it was going to be a long race. The next morning, here's how far things have progressed.


If all goes well, this should be done by mid-week.

[ygmir]

wow. this is sort of bewildering for me...........so cool

[trilobyte]

It's a strange and bewildering process for me too sometimes, Ygmir! The way it works is that the extruder or 'print head' part, the thing with that little fan mounted on it, is mounted to a control arm that can move back and forth on the X and Y axis. Sort of like a computer controlled etch-a-sketch. It basically draws out each layer (or slice) of the object, using heated up material (different types of plastics, metals, and other stuff) that feeds in on a filament... kind of like how wire feeds into a welder. As it completes each layer, the bed lowers down a tiny fraction of a millimeter, and it repeats the process.

I wish it was as simple as loading a design and pressing print, then waiting for it all to be finished, but so far I think using one of these things is more art than science. Each brand, make, and model of 3D printer is a whole different kind of beast with its own type of extruder/printhead, and every single type of material has its own settings (like speed and temperature) to fine-tune in order to get the best results for a particular project. The software is getting easier to use but still takes some getting used to. Making a 3D design to be 3D printed also has its own quirks (and is different than, say, working on 3D models of camp), but I'm enjoying the process of figuring it all out. I wish it was more like Star Trek, though, all this waiting is driving me nuts

[trilobyte]

Monday progress...

[EGAZ]

Quick sidebar: For your 3D printing enjoyment....
I have seen one of the first prototypes. They are local here in Phoenix.

https://localmotors.com/3d-printed-car/

[trilobyte]

The project finished printing up yesterday. Here's what it looked like after pulling off the scaffolding bits and hitting it with the dremel tool a bit...

https://67.media.tumblr.com/391307538aa ... 1_1280.jpg

And here's what it looked like with the computer on it.





The print... and the design.. isn't perfect, but is a pretty successful proof of concept. I've made a bunch of revisions to the design files and have ordered more of the black PLA (bio-plastic stuff) to make another one next week. Of course, once the gf saw the finished model, she asked about making a red one for her computer at work...

[Roundabout]

Very cool Trilo!!!

[ygmir]

wow Trilo!!! super!! well done!!

[EGAZ]

Very Nice Sir!! Excellent job!!

[trilobyte]

Thanks, guys. It's been a busy week of studio upgrading, testing, and whatnot... after many months of consideration, and talking with the company, and saving of pennies, we decided a few weeks ago that we were going to upgrade our 3D printer to the 'Pro' version. Just the discussion phase seemed to take forever, since I think that while the standard machines they make today can be fairly easily upgraded to pro... back when we got ours there was no pro version and a lot of the innards were different. But rockstars that they are (and burners to boot), they came up with an upgrade for us. And finally our new machine was ready on Monday. So that meant packing up the old one and heading across the bay to their headquarters. After getting the paperwork taken care of and picking up a spool of copper filament to play with, it was back to our place to set it up and get it configured and running.

The kitten approves of all new box deliveries, and insists that it's emptied out immediately.


After configuring and testing, it was time to play around with some testing. Here's a SkullyWings design, printed out using the Copper material


It looks a little blocky, but that particular print was done at a lower quality mode. I also did one with the settings cranked up. Our next step will be to put the copper test pieces into the tumbler to give them a good workout and see how nicely they polish up with the tools we have.

Now that the new machine was installed and in place, it was time to get cracking on a project I'd been thinking about for a while - a lighting system for the build platform. Previously we'd been using a simple clamp light attached to a storage rack next to the printer, but that can be a pain in the ass for a few reasons. The lighting is also uneven and has strong shadows when taking pics, as you can see from the shot above. The clamp light bulb also has a tendency to stab us both right in the eye at night if we're watching something on the tv (I know, first world problems). I saw a pic of something somebody had done several months ago, and wanted to take that a step further... and designed a HomeKit-enabled LED lighting system for the build platform. I hooked that up yesterday, and took lots of pictures so I could post an instructable so other people with 3D printers like ours could do the same. Here's what the build platform looks like now, with the lights turned on.



And here's a quick demo of how it works. Since it's HomeKit-enabled, we can turn the lights on/off with any iOS device just by telling Siri to do it.

[ygmir]

wow Trilo! you guys are at the edge. so cool!

[Ratty]

Trillo. Your work is amazing. You live in a world I will never enter. I did so one of these machines at the Makers Fair a couple years ago. They practically had to pick me up to get me to move away from it. Fascinating.

[trilobyte]

Thanks for the kind words, we both love the voyage of discovery that goes with learning to use and get good at new tools, as well as combining different skills and mediums.

Here are the SkullyWings after an hour in a tumbler...


The two pieces are printed at a slightly different size, and at different resolutions. The one on top (smaller one) is done at a 100 micron resolution (.1mm), the one on the bottom is done at 200 microns (.2mm). The printer is capable of printing as fine as 50 microns (.05mm), but that takes a lot longer and for the purposes of testing I wanted to see how these would come out first.

And all the copper pieces (the third piece is my trilo byte design icon) after 2 hours...


After running all night, things took a darker turn by the 9 hour mark...


Checking again at 10 1/2 hours, we gave them a was with a little dish soap...


The higher resolution piece is really looking fantastic, but I really like how the grain on the lower resolution piece looks. At this point, Pani grabbed the higher resolution piece and cleaned it up with a dremel tool for an hour, while I popped the other pieces back in the tumbler. I intentionally didn't clean the pieces up with the dremel first, as I wanted to see if time in the tumbler would take care of the rough spots or not. Next time we'll definitely want to use the dremel first. I'll post more pictures later.