More fingers!

Okay I am here once again with hopefully the final prototype after creating a finger with a better range of motion.

I tested out the finger attachment with the elastic to stop it from falling off when moving it with your hand positioned down, and I found that after awhile the elastic began to pull the finger too far past the finger stop, so on the first large part I added a little notch for my fingertip to fit in.

Now I am going to make things nicer with some filleting edges. Ah, that looks nice except- aak! wtf is this?

Well, It seems like if I just do it one chunk at a time it is okay.

A very annoying thing about selecting edges to fillet in rhino is that when you trim, if you select the wrong one when selecting multiple, you can just hit undo. However, it doesn't work like that with filleting.

I managed to get everything neatened up and added some little loops on the ring part for elastics. I printed the test with the intent that if it finished at 10pm and worked I could print it in good quality overnight while scaling it down to what I assumed would fit my pinky and printing a test of that as well. 

However, though most printed okay, the ring did not print the holes, and the middle section just crumbled apart. Erica the tech said it was probably due to open edges. I fixed the ring, but then realized that since I also needed to make the finger notch a little longer, that was a bunch of work that my brain does not want to do right now, so I will do that tomorrow, and finish glazing some ceramics tonight.  I am pretty confident that I am almost there though!

The next day I went back after remaking a few of the bits and it works perfectly! (besides the classic falling off the fingers thing that elastics will fix)

I decided to test out making the other fingers by scaling them down based on width. I did the pinky first because that was the biggest variable, besides the thumb. It fit great, so I rescaled the print for my middle and index fingers- they appeared to be the same width when I measured them. All that was good!

I have super fat thumbs so when I scaled it for my thumb it was giant! However, after scaling it up for width I then removed parts of each section with boolean differencing out middle bits to scale it down for length. The thumb test print took longer than any of my other prints even when using draft- over 7 hours. It was still massive! I didn't even bother putting it together.

At the same time I went and printed some good versions of the fingers that I had made successfully  with my nice filament. They looked sweet but one thing I noticed was that printing the thin tall bits that I used to join together my finger bits which never had a problem printing draft quality with the schools filament were failing after the first few layers. I then took them out of subsequent quality prints. I tried printing them with my filament at draft quality and they mostly worked, so I continued to print the rest of mine like that, separately and at draft quality. I wonder why it does that?

Anyways, the thumb was a failure so I tried remaking it again, only removing the fingertip and turning the end of the second join into a fingertip and remaking the first part your finger goes into. Some parts of it touched, plus the connectors and the rod that pushed the finger parts were too small, so I remade it again. This time it had better motion, but it did not bend much, plus it was too thin horizontally so the push bar pushed up against my thumb and I had difficulties bending it. I can see how I could rebuild parts of it and try again, and I'm certain that in 3-5 more prototypes I could achieve a working thumb, but considering how long it takes to both build and print I do not have time this semester. Maybe with another month. Although I am much quicker at remaking these parts, it is almost like modeling a whole new item because I will have to break down and change parts.

I noticed that when I tried tying a finger to a bracelet that I had that it wobbled around a bit. Therefore I did what I noticed a lot of other 3d printed finger people did- I printed a little plate for in the back of my wrist with holes for the strings. I also booleaned slots for velcro to slide into.  This seems to work good! Yayyyy!!

Now I can wave my unreasonably large fingers at everyone with reckless abandon!

More finger extension prototypes

     This week I have been working on more finger extension prototypes.

I changed a few things and and moved things around and make this much better pair! however, I need to change the way the end of the finger and the second to the end bit join so that the range of motion isn't stopped. 

I also think that making them a bit shorter would be a good idea so that they can actually curl into my palm a bit when closed. I added two little holes to the end closest to my hand to try and tie elastics onto like the ones I've seen online had- I wouldn't build a part that goes over the back of my hand yet if at all, I just wanted to see why that was necessary and it it even was. However, when I printed this version (which I thought could be the definitive version before aesthetic corrections and resized for different fingers) I think that all my cuts and joins and dodgy booleans I did during the rapid testing wound up with this not being a particularly solid print! 

It definitely seemed to have come apart at some points. However, the size looks good so I am going to fiddle around with remaking the parts in Rhino using the parts that I had made previously.

I rebuilt the parts. I tried adding a little bit of robotish detail.

I finished basically with just enough time to rush to school and set up my print so that it would finish at 12:45 right before the school closed! I stayed and worked on ceramics then booked it upstairs to grab it right before closing time.

The robot details wound up looking pretty crap but I DID IT! I have a finger with a range of motion. I'm so pleased. Now it is very late so I will go to sleep.

Prototyping some finger extensions

    Due to the stretchy filament being a little more time consuming and complicated I decided to go with making finger extensions (plus I really really need to wear them)

    At first I felt guilty that I was just copying something that someone had done, but then I realized that was probably fine as I was not going to just use an exact model, and for instance a bug chess set might just be copying what bugs look like and that's a cool idea (haha).

    I wanted to understand how the fingers worked, so I rewatched the video of the Mythbusters guy wearing the fingers, as well as looked at some plans someone on Thingverse has reverse engineered of Gary Fay's articulated fingers. Even looking at them I admit I was a bit confused, and decided that I needed to actually hold them and fiddle with them to figure them out. I decided to look for easy articulated hand crafts since it seemed like a common thing- I seemed to remember making not wearable ones out of straws and string when I worked at the daycare and the kids were obsessed with skeletons. I found a few videos of people making them out of popsicle sticks, but one video was confusing and the other one looked pretty janky. Eventually I found a video titled "Lady Gaga Chromatic Claw DIY" uploaded by someone called Operation Let's Do It on Youtube. He used PVC pipes, and also unlike Gary instead of having gears on top of the knuckles move the parts he just has a push rod underneath, which seems simpler and I am now okay with that because I am realizing that I need to prototype many many parts. Since I just wanted to understand how they worked, I decided to follow along with just a cardboard box, some staples and a bag of brads that I had for some reason. Watching instructional videos is somewhat irritating sometimes because you'll watch the person do something basic forever then suddenly he just rushes through an important part. He also did not show measurements for everything, which was okay- I just eyeballed it, and plus I would need to remeasure things for my fingers anyways.

    I wound up making... something. it did seem to work to a degree, but I could tell that the smooshing of the cardboard, which was of course not structurally strong, by the staples really closed off a lot of the space that the parts need to flow freely through to move. I think that is enough for me to start prototyping!

    I also bought tri-color filament because I think it'll look sweet. I'll try it for my little cup test to see what it is like, but I will do all my prototyping of the fingers with the pla thats provided.

So after I had printed the cup I decided it was time to make my first printed finger prototype. I decided that I would prototype it for one finger, then once I got that working I would scale it for other fingers and see how that worked out, then finally I would make "nice" versions that had for instance visible bits shaped in a better way aesthetically, possibly even with some circuitboard looking bits to give it more of a robot feel. That could wind up just being stretch goals depending on how long it takes to figure this out. 

I didn't want to get  distracted so I walked my dog then I went to a neighbourhood cafe because even though nobody cares  I feel like everyone there will know if I am not doing work. I was really bad at taking screenshots of what I was doing because I was all focused and stuff.

I did a lot of making a 2d shape and then extruding it. I was basically trying to copy the cardboard one only measure distances properly and make things one piece when possible. For the first one, I did not do any joinery as I figured I could just connect them somehow and worry about all that later.

I arranged all the bits close together so that they would fit on the tray, but when I put them into slicer they seemed to be drifting all over the place and not on the surface. So I went back into rhino and rotated and moved them so that they were all on zero and then I printed!

I used draft quality and it worked well- except when I rearranged things I accidentally created an IRL unauthorized booloean union with the ring part and two other parts. 

That was fine though because from this draft I could tell that the part that the tip of my finger was too small and that I needed a cut out for a part to move through clearly, so I fixed that. Peter had said that it was possible to just print joineries right in the thing as well, so I tried making some- however then my print was too large for the print bed. 

maybe I can reposition it a bit later, but for now I just print the joineries out with only one part of the "pin" being larger, I imaging that after I insert them possibly I can just touch the end with a soldering iron to flatten it out.

After I printed the new parts out thankfully there was no dumb accidental booleans but I had cut the wrong part out of a piece to allow one of the rods to pass through, so I went back the reprinted that part again on Sunday before work and just picked it up after. I also cut it a bit smaller. I am going to assemble it now.

Some of the joiney pins were not big enough so I just used a soldering iron to melt down filament in the groves. 

Putting it on I can tell that I need to make the two bars that help move it smaller, and I can also see parts where some of the material needs to be removed for more mobility.  I also think that making the holes aa big larger for the pins so that I can make larger ones for structural integrity would be good, but it is a good start I am getting there!

Preparing my little vessel for printing

     Today  I am going to try and prepare my little vessel for printing. It's so nice that Prusa is open source!

The tutorial for this week has a recorded transcript but no video, but I think I can do this pretty easily. (famous last words? hopefully not). With the other tutorial videos as well as the transcript (I am a fast reader) it should be all good. I even find the transcript more helpful than the video anyways sometimes.

But then I tried to import my stl file and slicer is saying (3mf/amf) and I am like, well that's rude.

Nevermind! I was looking at the wrong thing.

Overall it was pretty simple to import and change the settings. I can't remember what the infil pattern was set to in the beginning, but when I changed it to gyroid the print time went down ~10 minutes to 1hr39 minutes and the other patterns seemed similar so I will leave it at that.

Once I got to the lab, since I decided to test out my filament I bought, we turned the quality up.

Overall the printing went well and it looks sweet!

Designing a cup for a 3D print test!

     Today I am designing a cup to print to test out 3D printing! I feel like maybe I will be too into this due to making cups in glass and ceramic already. However, if it is good I can maybe use it as a mold for the future!

I drew a bunch of designs and I figure I will just play around with them until I have something that I like.

The first thing I did was make a box that was 5x5x6 so I would know my maximum height and width. Then I took out a ruler to see how big 6cm tall is. Oh my gosh! That's so small haha. I think some of my ideas are too complicated here! It's still too early to tell if that is a relief or not.

Somehow in getting my ruler from a drawer I had inadvertantly gotten rid of my top and side bars in rhino and now am stressed out. Uncool. I literally don't even have a command bar. Tried closing rhino and reopening but it's still like this. All toolbar things I'm getting when googling seem to be about getting fancy schmancy toolbars. I tried clicking "restore defaults" under settings>toolbars. wow this is so classic me that when I'm feeling confident and optimistic some dumb thing like this would happen which will probably take me hours to figure out. Love it.

Thankfully someone on the internet also had this problem and window>restore window layout did the trick.

For the first one I decided to try to make the "traditional" cup.  I make two circles with the top one only being slightly larger than the bottom one, and lofted them. I then capped the object then shelled it removing the top face. Done!

haha jk.

I then decided to make a line and rotate it 30 degrees then mirror it, just so I had a little guideline of what would work.

I made an....ellipsoid? then rotated it horizontally at a similar angle as the cup and put it adjacent to the cop so that it overlapped at the bottom but  not at the top. I then decided that I wanted 13 of them cutting out parts of the shape, so I rotated and copied it around 13 times after dividing 360 by 13. 

I wanted to have a lip, but knew it couldn't come out at 90 degrees due to how printing works. I then used curve told to make a line about the same angle as the cutouts from my cup. That was not sharp enough though so I rotated it a bit then compared it to my 30 degree measure line to make site that it wasn't too sharp.

After a bit of mucking around and making a line to use to measure another circle I was able to sweep2 to get the curve to the wider part around the cup shape... but oh wait. somewhere In there I deleted something important, like a wall of this cup. Horrible. At least I kind of know how to redo it hopefully quicker.

I kept doing "undo multiple" until each time a "delete" showed up. eventually I got way back to before I had done all my boolean differences. 

I am not really sure why the rendered part looks good but the wireframe perspective looks like it is missing the outside surface? I guess we will burn that bridge when we come to it. EDIT: I was just looking at it wrong.

I tried rebuilding the sweep part to make the cup larger at the top but honestly it looked a but dumb like a super mario pipe so I got rid of it.

I tried chamfering the edges over and over but it wasn't working for me, so I undid all of that. The filleting seemed better.

I decided that it wasn't interesting enough, so I would do the twist thing.  I keep in every class struggling to use fibbonaci somehow because I'm crazy, and I realize now that 13 (the number of bottom booleaned out objects I have) is a fibbonaci number. What if I twisted this so it was 5 of those over one way, and 8 over of the other? I like just seeing what math things do.

Ugh trying to find the center of an object for twisting is kind of like a weird fishing minigame.

I copied over my cup a few times. I twisted it 5 notches over, or 138.46 degrees. to rotate it 8 notches over it would be 221.538 degrees. I wasnt sure if twisting it the same direction or the opposite would be better so I went for the same first since mirroring it would be easy.

It looked cool by itself being twisted the same direction but I don't think that combining them would be interesting so I mirrored the second one.

Now I am trying to boolean union them- possibly the last step in making this? However, now my computer is giving me a spinning screen of death. Nooooo! It's been a minute, so I guess I will go put some bread in the breadmaker and check on it after.

In three hours I will have fresh warm bread! Yay! However, I still have the spinning rainbow circle of waiting. Gross! Did I do the thing again where I made it too complicated and now it needs to think really hard? Hopefully I don't need to force quit rhino or something like that. I guess I will go and start getting stuff ready for the dog park, since once I am done with this that was my plan.

After about 20 minutes (I know because I checked how much time was left on the bread) it seemed to have finished but the boolean failed. I just took them apart because honestly I kind of liked how they looked separate, like using an optic mold for glass. After rewatching the part of the tutorial were the object was not happy because the lines were not precise, maybe my crazy rotating and joining won't actually work, so I'll just leave it. It's just a test anyways, and I went way too hard on my laser cut test.

3D Printing Inspiration!

     I am happy to be working on a creative project now! Next we are going to be 3D printing things. There's a whole bunch of possibilities so I am trying to figure out where to start my brain out compiling some lists of inspiration from or ideas

   Anyways, next there is this Gary Fay guy who makes articulated finger extensions. They are PLA

It's funny because I wanted finger extensions for a long time probably from literally putting clothespegs on all my fingers and waving my hands around like they were really long is it so satisfying. I was like oh...this must exist somewhere, they are probably like metal and make with jewelry making stuff. It literally did not come into my mind until like a minute before I just looked if this was a thing.

my hands yearn to wear them 

someone doing the thing with them

even Lady Gaga was wearing these and maybe I knew? But I forgot.

    Anyways, another group that is doing interesting things is OCH Ceramics, who work with 3D printed ceramics similar to what our Prof for this course works with some time. I first heard of them on a ceramics podcast.

    

    I really like how variations in the layers allow different amounts of light in in a ...mathematically pleasing way, if that makes sense.

Them having big architectural stuff was cool. Like this thing was just chunks of ceramic (or concrete?) that hung off each other. The website said it created moiré patterns which is kind of a type of optical illusions similar to if you have two mesh screens on top of each other. I really like physiological optical illusions, the ones where your brain gets confused and sees things moving when they aren't, ect and I think that digital design can help with that since it can help you get precision in calculating and fabricating confusing objects.

    I would be really interested in trying to print pate de verre, which is a type of glass paste that is pressed into a mold a fired. I think possibly printing it then only firing it to a tack fuse could possibly be feasible. Then I am back with materials exploration again! My jam.

 Also, just going to sidebar onto this whole thing I've seen online of people sticking diffraction grating onto their print base sheet thing and getting holographic stuff. Any time I can iridize or make something holographic I am there. 

   

    Next there is this artist that I keep seeing popping up on Instagram under the name Sewprinted. She prints using plant based filaments which are stiff like PLA as well as FilaFlex to make either sequin like pieces to attach to fabric, or she will print from both sides (flipping after the first print) with a thin fabric like tulle in between.

This skirt was printed as a solid piece onto fabric with some squares cut around with scissors after for movement

This jacket had sequins that were sewn on after- they had a mesh tab at the top to sew on the jacket.

        I thought this was pretty cool because I have been interested in exploring different materials as sequins in the past, having attempted using weird things like thin wood peeled from wet logs as well as cut feathers. However, when I re-came across her account I was more trying to see if anyone had just made from the stretchy filament like those body harnesses? Either I do not know where to look that well (though honestly Instagram was easier to find stuff on that was cool than like, a search engine) 

This wasn't 3d printed. This is just a Blackmilk body harness.

This Turkish lady is apparent 3D printing these, but I do not like them.

I was more hoping there's be someone making things like these Silicone tentacle harnesses that Tinkercast on Instagram makes. Like, not necessarily tentacles but like, but creative I guess?

    I started following them a few years ago, they basically do something similar that Sewprinted does with the tights here, only instead of printing on either sides of a mesh fabric, they use silicon in molds on sheer tights so it looks like mermaid scales.

    I think printing a cage/harness thing out of stretchy filament in little parts that get connected would be sweet. Since it's almost like a belt it doesn't matter as much if it's a bit stiff. You could do 3D designs or even just 2D ones on the diffraction grating to make them holographic! 

    Honorable mentions go to:

 Brian Gillespie from my laser cutting presentation with his blow molds that he made in Rhino

Here's a screenshot of the Instagram thumbnail because when I go to clock the link it immediately goes to him making it

https://www.instagram.com/p/C3vAdN0rdta/

Brandyn Callahan is blowing glass through the 3D printed ceramics to make lighting and that's just crazy. How does it fit without cracking what is going on here???

There's also a 3D glass printer but hahaha it's really really expensive

probably in part because it has to get soooooo hot

    It's kind of cool because you buy another machine with it to make long thin poles of glass out of recycled glass to use. However, almost because it is so specific I am less interested in it.