Ally's Process Blog

Project 1: Milestone 1

I feel like I draw out of a very shallow pool of topics when it comes to things like this. I focus on either something mental health related, food systems related, or environmental. This time, I dipped into my inspiration pool and pulled out… mental health and the environment! What a surprise. But, it is a combination of my interests this time, so I think I should get a few extra points for that.

I want to focus on creating a digital space that is intended to inform people about “nature on the brain.” It turns out that humans and the natural world have a tighter connection that perhaps we previously imagined. I am really interested on the psychological impacts of reintroducing humans into the natural world and the benefits that can have. This site will offer information for users on the details of how nature can influence mental health and provide a few ideas or resources to encourage people of all experience levels to get outside.

My inspiration for this site is from two resources. First, the book “The Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv, which is a child psychology study on the impacts of a reduction of play and outdoor time. Second, a recent article in National Geographic called “Your Brain on Nature” focused on a psychology study monitoring the brain waves of humans in nature versus in a city center.

My goal for this site is to offer information and resources about the effects of a lack of nature exposure on the human mental state. The intended audience is people who suffer from the mental afflictions that can be eased by intense exposure to nature and those who are consumed by the corporate world and can benefit from a decrease in stress levels.

I will be using jQuery because that selector model makes a lot more sense to me, and in terms of increasing the amount of interaction (which is vital for an informational site) it just seems to offer some useful shortcuts. I am also looking at including an API (I’m not sure which yet. After class on Tuesday when we cover APIs I’ll have a much better idea!) that will integrate Twitter hashtag frequencies about national parks and national forests to chart attention that they are getting. Twitter has an API (https://developer.twitter.com) which could be very useful to me. I think this live data will help people to understand the heartbeat of America’s connection with green spaces.

I think that all of my content will be available from research papers and the two sources mentioned above. The site will be mostly image and graphic based, with text that appears on hover and click states. I don’t want to use massive text chunks because they can drive people away, and don’t want to frighten anyone.

The color palettes I am considering are below.

Screen Shot 2019-09-29 at 8.57.37 PM Screen Shot 2019-10-01 at 8.21.32 AM

And here are a few of the visual design sketches, though they are rough.

I’m not sure exactly how mobile would work yet, but I’m thinking that something like this would be cool!

Lab 2: Digital I/O

There were two parts to this lab. In the first, we were supposed to build a circuit with two buttons that controlled lights. Each of the buttons was supposed to make the lights have a different reaction. The second part of the lab was to create two breakout boards, one for output and one for input. I did the second part of the lab first, so I’ll walk through that process and then cover the digital i/o circuit.

To make the breakout with the lights, I first built and tested the circuit on my breadboard. I decided to use two lights in series with a 47 ohm resistor. The power goes in through the black wire, through the resistor, illuminates the two LEDs, and returns to ground via the blue wire.

Then, I moved the circuit to the breakout board and tested it by simply pinching the wires in place. It worked, so I soldered the wires, one resistor, and two lights. The black wire is input or signal, while the blue wire is ground.

Next, I created the breakout board with the switch. This involved three wires, a drop down resistor, and the switch itself. Again, I built and tested the circuit on the breadboard before moving it to the breakout board. It worked, so I soldered it. The yellow wire is ground, the black wire is power, and the signal wire is blue.

The circuit works because the power flows in through the black wire and, when the switch is closed, out through the blue wire. When the switch is open, the power flows through the drop down resistor (100K ohms) and through the yellow wire back to ground.

I tested both breakout boards by connecting them to the arduino and uploading code indicating that if the switch was flipped, the lights should illuminate.

Next, I started working on the digital input/output circuit. This required me to use the neopixels, so first I soldered those. Because I had a really hard time with my stranded wire fraying and breaking, I used all solid core wire. The only available color was blue, so all three wires (power, ground, and signal) are all blue. This, it turns out, was probably a mistake because I continuously plug it in the wrong way.

But, I got it working! I then built a circuit with the neopixel, my breakout board with a switch (which is why I had to go over part two first) and a second switch attached to my bread board.

I chose to use two maintained switches and made them change the color of the neopixel depending on the combination in which they were flipped. The code is attached below, but essentially when switch one was on, the lights were white, when both were on, the lights were blue, when both were off, the lights were green, and when only the second switch was on, the lights were red.

	#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>
	#ifdef __AVR__
	#include <avr/power.h>
	#endif

	//define the digital pin that the LED strip is connected to
	#define PIN 8
	int buttonOne = 10;
	int buttonTwo = 9;
	//the first parameter is the number of LEDs you have – change for your strip
	Adafruit_NeoPixel strip = Adafruit_NeoPixel(5, PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);

	void setup() {
	strip.begin(); //we always need to do this
	strip.show(); // Initialize all pixels to 'off'
	Serial.begin(9600);
	}

	void loop() {
	Serial.print("buttonOne");
	Serial.print(digitalRead(buttonOne));
	Serial.print(" buttonTwo");
	Serial.println(digitalRead(buttonTwo));

	if(digitalRead(buttonOne) == 1){
	for(uint16_t i=0; i<strip.numPixels(); i++){
	strip.setPixelColor(i,255,255,153); //white
	strip.show();
	}
	}
	if(digitalRead(buttonTwo) == 1){
	for(uint16_t i=0; i<strip.numPixels(); i++){
	strip.setPixelColor(i, 250, 0, 0); //red
	strip.show();
	}
	}
	if(digitalRead(buttonTwo) == 1 && digitalRead(buttonOne)==1){
	for(uint16_t i=0; i<strip.numPixels();i++){
	strip.setPixelColor(i, 80, 140, 140); //blue
	strip.show();
	}
	}
	if(digitalRead(buttonTwo) == 0 && digitalRead(buttonOne)==0){
	for(uint16_t i=0; i<strip.numPixels();i++){
	strip.setPixelColor(i, 0, 255, 0); //green
	strip.show();
	}
	}
	}

view raw

labTwoDigitalIO.ino

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The arduino, breakout board, and breadboard look a little crazy (because the neopixel and breakout board stick out), but here it is:

In this circuit, the breadboard was connected to the power and ground of the arduino. The neopixels were connected to the power and ground of the breadboard and pin 8 of the arduino. The breadboard also housed the first switch and a drop down resistor that connected to ground. The switch connected to input pin 9 on the arduino. The second switch lived on the breakout board. It connected to power on the breadboard, ground on the arduino, and input on pin 10 of the arduino. The code controlled which color the lights turned when the arduino read input from pin nine or ten.

When I tested it, it worked! Hurrah!

Class Portal: Milestone Two

Remember how I said I always bite off more than I can chew, but I wasn’t going to do that this time?

Yeah… I did it again.

I thought that images would prove to be a lot easier to work with than they actually are. My initial design was the interactive, motion filled plot that I submitted for milestone one. My final design is… well, a lot more static. It turns out that images aren’t the most responsive thing, so I spent a LOT of time fighting with CSS.

The root of the image issue is that I wanted a background image and a semi-transparent overlay that covered only part of the background image. The paragraph for the description would show up in the overlay on hover. Ok, sounds easy. Well, not so much. Turns out, it is really hard to position elements in terms of their siblings CSS and have it be responsive. First, I tried using an empty div with a background color set to be transparent, but even with a fixed width and height, I couldn’t get the div to show up. Then, I created two separate images: one background image, and one transparent png. At this point, I could get them both to show up, but not overlay.

So, I explored online (see sources below) and found that many people solved this issue with the position property. If you set one element as relative and the other as absolute, you can force them to overlay. Perfect!

Just kidding. The relative element is relative to the page as a whole, not to the absolute element, so as soon as you shrink the page, my transparent overlay was running away from the background image it was supposed to be covering. Cue frustrated scream.

After some more digging, I finally found it. A solution. It turns out that you can use CSS grids to force things to overlay by specifying that they occupy the same grid area. Thus, I ended up with this:

Screen Shot 2019-09-18 at 7.34.24 PM

Is it the most aesthetically pleasing thing on the planet? No. Is it the most functional? Definitely not. (You have to hover over only the background image, not the transparent image to get the description to show up…fancy, I know). Is it responsive? Well… More responsive than absolute positioning, that is for sure. Here it is without using media queries and just relying on the natural responsiveness of the grid:

Screen Shot 2019-09-18 at 7.38.51 PM

I sort of changed my plan for what I want the mobile version to look like. On a phone, it’ll just be tiles of color with the description already visible (since mouseover isn’t an option on a phone):

Screen Shot 2019-09-18 at 9.09.33 PM

Another problem that I encountered was with my menu system. Initially, I was going to use these cute little downwards pointing arrows to take the viewer directly to my projects, labs, or exams. First, they were buttons, but you can’t change the appearance of buttons that much, and that really didn’t fit what I wanted to do. Then, they were links with an arrow image, but the words kept getting covered by the image, and it really didn’t look good. How about just putting the word in the image and using the whole image as a link? Nope. Back to the “images are really not responsive,” combined with “if you make an image really tiny, and the text is already really tiny, you definitely cannot read any of the text at all. Cool. So I gave up on the whole images/arrows thing and just went with your standard nav bar with text links. Fancy? No. But way more functional.

Screen Shot 2019-09-18 at 9.09.51 PM

I finally added some nice looking fonts, a splash page image, and I think everything looks ok-ish. My final product’s first page looks like:

Screen Shot 2019-09-18 at 10.14.27 PM

And the mobile version looks like:

In terms of what I’d do differently next time, well, plan better and start earlier are the big two I think. Even though I’ve been working on this for about a week and a bit, when problems hit, they hit hard. I think I restarted twice because my CSS just became too tangled and perplexing.

The current iteration of my portal is live here, but this will probably change as I learn to do new, cool things that’ll work better than my current “hacked” solutions.

Sources:

https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/css-grid-layout-quick-start-guide–cms-27238

https://gridbyexample.com/learn/2016/12/20/learning-grid-day20/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16372000/how-to-overlap-two-div-in-css

https://blog.udemy.com/css-overlay/

Front-End Web Dev Milestone 1

Building a portal is always very difficult for me—it is one of those things where I have a vision that seems reasonable and easily completed, but always ends up vaguely disappointing. This is what happened with my Web Portal, my Creative Dev Tools Portal, and most of the personal portals that I have coded. I think part of the problem is that I dream too big. I pick themes and topics that are too wide, complicated and out of the range of my skills. Also, I fall prey to feature creep. I like to add a lot of “cool” design elements, which end up breaking the continuity of my site.

This time, I’m going to do my best to avoid all of the above issues! I am very drawn to minimalist, simple sites:

A Squarespace Dev’s site

The same Squarespace site

National Geographic Site

This site will have a minimalist theme that puts all the emphasis on my work. I like earth tone color palettes, but I don’t tend to use them very successfully or elegantly. This time, I think I’ll try a minimalist, neutral palette with a bright, earth tone accent. I am thinking about using something like this:

Screen Shot 2019-09-08 at 9.15.04 AM

Screen Shot 2019-09-08 at 12.13.54 PM

The goal for the portal is to show off my work in a visually appealing way. I think that the design below might be something that I pursue (if I can figure out how). I like the idea of using a lot of images and having them slide on hover to reveal text.

Screen Shot 2019-09-08 at 9.07.02 AM

(I like how the site above uses images, though some of the captions are difficult to read.) My idea (below) is based on rectangles, a lot of images (probably black and white), and colored underlays.

This would be very frustrating on a phone screen, so I think for anything under the size of an iPad (about 800px wide), I would switch to a more static display. The menu could be accessed by clicking a button (probably a hamburger menu icon) at the top and would slide out of the side of the page. The images wouldn’t move any longer—they would turn into small, static images that had the descriptive text below them.

In both cases, the image would act as a link to the project. In the case of the mobile site, there would be an additional link at the bottom of the description leading to the project.

The site will consist of a landing page that has my projects displayed on it, a basic contact page (for the process journal, github, and linkedIn), and an “about me” page. They will be accessed through a menu on the top of the page for the full-sized site.

Each project will be accessed by clicking on the image associated with it, or by clicking the “see the project” link at the bottom of the description. The “home” page (index.html) will my work page or the page that has all of my projects on it. About me and contact information will be linked at the top, but because my work is my primary focus, I’d like to use that as the landing page.

I’ll have separate sections within that “my work” page for projects and labs. Projects will be above labs (showcased, as I assume they will be a lot nicer to look at). If the projects section gets too terrible to scroll through, I can add a button that will take the user directly to the labs section, which would be fixed in the lower right hand corner of the screen. The labs and projects will be separated by clear headings, so if someone is scrolling fast, they don’t accidently miss the transition.

Lab 1: Basic Electronics

In this lab, the objective was to build two circuits: one that had two LEDS in parallel, and one that had the two LEDs in series. Each circuit also included a voltage regulator, power source (9V), and resistors.

The first circuit that I built was the circuit in series. Series means that the LEDs are “in a line” like ducklings following their mom duck. When components are in series, the voltage is divided between them, though the current is not. I used red LEDs, which need two volts of energy each.

To begin actually building the circuit, I first drew the schematic and calculated the resistance necessary (I got 50 ohms).

Next, I actually built the circuit. I had a bit of trouble identifying the pins for the power source, which caused my first attempt to fail. After looking up the pinout, struggling for a bit, and rearranging things, I figured it out.

After this, I built the parallel circuit. When components are in parallel they are “next to each other”. They don’t actually have to be next to each other in physical proximity, but the difficulty of getting to either of the LEDs for the electricity is about the same. In a parallel circuit, the current is split, not the voltage.

Again, I started by drawing the schematic and calculating the necessary resistance (75 ohms in this case).

For this circuit, I only had to move a few things from my series circuit, so the actual construction was pretty quick.

Next, we were supposed to build our own switch. I ended up building two because they are really finicky, and I wanted to make something more reliable.

For the first switch, I just took two small square pieces of foam, used the conductive copper tape to attach the wires, and stuck the copper tape (and wires) to the foam. Then, I placed another piece of foam with a hole cut in the middle between them, so they only touch if the foam in the center is compressed.

You have to pinch the foam really hard, and in just the right place (which seems to move) to get the switch to work, but nonetheless, here it is:

Then, I started on my enclosure. In the process of building the enclosure, I realized that it was really annoying to have to pinch the switch so hard (and my enclosure couldn’t support that much pressure). Because of this, I built a second switch. This one is essentially the same as the first, but made of cardboard, and there is no central piece of foam. It has a hinge, so when you want the circuit to be closed, you just hinge the switch closed so the copper tape touches. This switch works slightly better, but is still not as reliable and sensitive as I would like it to be.

Regardless, I built my little enclosure (it is a lighthouse!! Even though it looks more like the Eye of Sauron…) and it illuminates.

Final Project: Dreaming of Functionality

Here we are, at the end of the semester. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on how far I have come and how much I have learned. I’ve become accustomed to Rhino (I wouldn’t say mastered, yet, but we are getting closer), I’ve learned how to 3D print, and I’ve learned I love laser cutting. We’ve done joinery and unrolling, modeling and rendering, and now, finally, an independent fabrication project. I’ve come so far and done so much…and yet I have approximately zero functional objects. (Not quite true—I have one pair of leaf earrings that I haven’t mounted yet.)

So! The goal for this project is a functional object. In particular, a functional jewelry box. It is a hexagon, laser cut out of wood, with double curvature. Because of the curved sides, I need the wood to be flexible. I got a vector based plan off the internet and warped and trimmed it to fit my panes.

I guess I should start with the start, rather than starting in the middle, huh? First I modeled the box in three dimensions. To do this, I did a rail revolve, then put a hexagon in it and used that as a template to extract isocurves. I lofted the curves into each other, making the outside of my box. Then, I capped it, exploded, and deleted the top surface. Next, I unrolled the surface into a “flower” with panels that attached at petals. For more details, check out Lab 4, Rendering the Thing. Here are some images of the Rhino files:

Next (as I mentioned earlier), I spent a lot of time getting the flexible wood pattern onto each of the panels. At first, as I rendered in Lab 4, I wanted to hold the sides of the box together with pins. This plan was pretty quickly defeated when I realized I would have to drill pin holes by hand at the correct angle into my flexible wood. This didn’t sound fun, so I decided to pursue other options. The current plan is to stitch or thread my box together using a thick, rough twine. I’ve done a few tests, and it both works well and looks pretty neat.

As far as testing has gone, the first was a royal failure. I printed it out, but the laser cutter didn’t go all the way through, and I snapped the first panel in half in my hand almost immediately. Whoops.

I realized at this point that my initial plan of bending the petals up to form the box out of a single piece was not going to work. With some help (thanks, Camila!), I adjusted my plans, so I could print all the petals separately and attach them to the base. I mean, I’m already spending a ridiculously long time sewing wood, so what is six more seams?

After adjusting my design, I printed a second test, and things went much more smoothly. This test actually bent! I stitched it together, and it doesn’t look too bad!

I made two more minor adjustments and did my final print. After about 45 minutes, the laser cutter was finished, and I had the last iteration of my box. So proud.

Over the weekend, I spent a lot of hours stitching and gluing it together (I would highly recommend this technique for procrastinating other, less pleasant final projects. It worked wonders for me.)

To my surprise, it all worked out! The stitchwork doesn’t look bad, the flexible wood is bending the right amount, and the lid (which I didn’t print a test for—really tempting fate) fits. Here it is:

Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. I think the next steps (should I ever have free time again) would be to make some sort of shelving or organization system inside of the box, and a hinged lid that latches shut. I actually sketched out a bunch of different ideas for the joints in the box and on the lid, but decided they should be a later problem.

But for now, I’m happy with this.

Thanks for sticking with me through my journey discovering Rhino, rendering, fabrication, and, finally, functionality!

Lab 4: Rendering the Thing

In this lab we rendered the thing. Hurrah.

I think this was, for me, the most frustrating lab to date. Mostly not a me problem, mostly a tech problem, which is almost worse. Fusion 360 does not play well with my little MacBook Air—it just does not want to give me images that look good at all.

What, you may be asking, was the objective of this lab?

Well, we are coming into finals (alarmingly fast), and so in this lab we modeled and rendered our final project. For me, this is an elaborate jewelry box made from laser cut flexible wood. It is is a hexagon with curved sides that I have unrolled and will print out. The flexible wood will cover the sides, providing the curvature, and I will hold together the panels with pins. The top is just solid, flat panes, which I will hold together with… something. Still working on that one. I think glue may be the solution, but if I have time, I’d love to build some sort of central locking puzzle piece at the crown. Anyway, that is a later problem. For now, only the body of the box is really the focus.

Here are my plans in Rhino:

And unrolled, it looks like this:

Screen Shot 2019-04-06 at 8.37.29 PM

I made this by revolving a curve, then putting a hexagon around it. After that, I used my new favorite command, extract isocurve, and used the hexagon as a template to get profile curves of the revolved shape. Finally, I lofted extracted curves together with straight sections, giving me a curved but hexagonal box. Nifty!

The plans for flexible wood are below. I put them in Adobe Illustrator, then uploaded them to rhino. Then, I used scale and taper to get them into the petals the way I wanted.

flexwood

Before I get to my real rendering, I would like to take a moment to complain.

Because I am a bright ray of sunshine, I will first list positive things about this lab:

I am very excited for the final project. I can’t wait to see if I am going to able to successfully construct this.
I learned about rendering.
Fusion 360 has a large bank of textures and stuff, which is very interesting and nice to use.

Because I am actually not a ray of sunshine at all (bet you never would have guessed that, huh?) here are a few of the things that made me want to scream:

Why is this the highest quality image I get from Fusion 360 after waiting for two and half hours??? Come on!
How big is a custom background supposed to be, and why can I not find any documentation on it?
Why do my backgrounds, custom or otherwise, fail to show up when I render?
Why is there no easy way to delete a decal?
Why don’t my decals show up when I render?

So yes, all of this is to say, I really struggled with this. I put a lot of hours in, and didn’t get a whole lot out, but hey, such is life.

Here is what I got.

This is the whole scene, consisting of 1 table, 1 jewelry box, 1 pair of earrings (no, you can’t see them), and 1 smoked glass vase:

NoBGR1

The box is rendered with stained pine (realistic) and brass pins (idealistic). Note that when it renders, you cannot see the decals. The large image is not “rendered”. It is just the preview/normal window view (which is why it looks so bad). Also, for the record, there is actually a background in all of these images. You can actually see it best in the reflection on the vase. Here are some close ups:

The three items that I rendered in addition to my box were the vase, a pair of earrings, and the table. Here is a close up of the earrings rendered (they look super unnatural, I know):

EarringsR1

To make the earrings make more sense (because you can’t really see them all that well), here are the Rhino files for all of the above:

In conclusion, I’m not thrilled with rendering. I need to explore how it is done in Rhino, because Fusion 360 doesn’t seem to like me much. Second conclusion: I really hope this box turns out! I’m pretty excited to see how it goes.

P.S. I’ll keep fighting with Fusion and see what I can come up with. If I end up with any renders that are better/on-par with what I have now, I’ll throw them in down here.

RenderBox

Lab 3: Unrolling

Well, here we are. Form lab three! In this lab, we are working with unrolling, or the art of modeling something in three dimensions, then making it into a shell that I can flatten out and unroll into a two dimensional plan. Think about something that can be printed out with a normal ink printer, like when you were little and made cubes out of paper—that is an unrolled plan. It is pretty simple—until you are trying to model something that is an abstract form, curving in multiple directions. Then, things get a little messy.

Part 1: Unroll something

Sadly, the laser cutter kicked the bucket promptly at the start of this lab, throwing a bit of a wrench in my initial plot. I really wanted to laser cut a jewelry box out of wood, but this is not something that I can do with a normal printer, so I had to rearrange my expectations. I decided on two things. Because I was limited to paper, I wanted to pick an object that would be both attractive and functional when it was that delicate. My solution was paper earrings (a little odd, and the “functional” bit is definitely arguable, I know). The second object I wanted to unroll was the design for my jewelry box, which will go on the back burner for now.

So, how did I make some paper earrings? Well, actually WAY too much trial and error. The way you unroll things in Rhino is by turning them into a mesh, reducing it, turning it back into a surface (meshtoNURBS) to unroll. This makes things challenging for me, because I wanted a funky, geometric but still moderately organic shape for the earrings. Well, surfaces that curve in multiple directions (i.e. any organic shape ever) are really hard to reduce to a mesh that makes sense. I tried a fair few things:

Screen Shot 2019-03-18 at 10.29.16 AM

Screen Shot 2019-03-18 at 10.29.30 AM I ended up with something a little more geometric than my original vision, but that is alright with me! Though, I have to admit,even with this extremely simple, geometric shape, my brain noped out pretty quickly when looking at the unrolled plans. I don’t know why, but I really, really struggle with moving things from two dimensions to three dimensions in my head. Dirty secret: I actually had to take a remedial spatial visualization class as a freshman, and yet my little star was still overwhelming. I suppose there will always be things that we just don’t understand, and maybe “re-rolling” in my head is one of my substantial weaknesses. Luckily, this hasn’t negatively impacted my life too much, as it doesn’t exactly come up every day. All of this complaining is to say that I unrolled the plans (yes labels, no exploding), and grouped them into pieces that made sense to me…which took a really long time because this doesn’t make sense to me. Here’s what I ended up with:

I also made a little mockup of my imaginary jewelry box by using a rail revolve (unrolled plans are above):

Now, printing part one! I tried to print both of the unrolled plans on one piece of standard sized paper.

Ready to learn a new, fun game? It is called: get very frustrated while trying to cut out, fold, and glue and itty-bitty piece of delicate printer paper! Moral of the story is that these two plans need to be on different sheets of paper if I am not going to lose my mind trying to assemble these shapes. Here are the larger plans:

After an adventurous time putting these together, here is the final, folded result. (P.S. this is not a career for me. I still almost lost my mind.)

Part 2: 3D print three things

This lab wasn’t actually separated into parts, but I thought this division made sense. We were also supposed to model and 3D print three objects of our choice. Being myself and having my eternal dedication to useless things, I decided to continue following my previously set pattern and print things that are both ugly and worthless! Hurrah. Actually, I had big dreams and good intentions this time, it just didn’t turn out as well as I hoped. Such is life. Some of my rough sketches are above.

Remember the mushroom from last lab? The one with the round bottom that (surprise!) didn’t stand up? Well, I decided to continue down that rabbit hole (heard of the sunk cost fallacy, anyone?) and make my mushroom a pot! I lofted squares into each other (easy-peasy) and then added some rectangular supports to make absolutely sure it stood on its own. Here it is!

So useful and wonderful! Now, let’s take a closer look. Can you spot the mistake?

If you noticed that this thing is pretty much microscopic, yeah… You are right. I may have messed up the scale a bit. It is kind of cute, though.

Next, (because I am also on a jewelry kick) I decided to print out some earrings. I wanted them to be a leaf skeleton, which was beautiful and wonderful in Rhino, and definitely not in real life. I traced the veins in a leaf with curves, then I used the pipe command to make them round. After that, I spent a lot of time doing either BooleanUnion or splitting and joining surfaces and curves (depending on whether they intersected or not). This is what the plan looked like:

Screen Shot 2019-03-19 at 9.31.24 PM

Then, I 3D printed. A running theme on this lab seems to be that I don’t understand scale. The first time I printed, it was so tiny and delicate the only thing that actually printed was the supports. So, I simplified the curve and made a larger pipe, and printed again. And it was massive. I’m giving it another hack tomorrow (Tuesday) night if I have time—I’d really like these to be something that I can actually wear. (My second try is on top, and they were not good. The third print is the blue bottom image, and it is much, much better!)

My final object is a little gift for my dad. We are cyclists, and I wanted to 3D print him a little cyclist thing to go on his keys. I used the “life is good” dude as a model, and traced all the curves as outlines. Then, I used extrude curve and BooleanUnion a lot of times and got a little surface that looks like a cyclist that I am rather happy with.

This is the final object that I will print, also on Tuesday. I’ll jump back on and do a quick update after it is finished. I really hope I have a learning curve that is better than a flat line, and I can figure out the scale on this thing the first time I print it.

Update: My learning curve is, in fact, a flat line. It is totally messed up. I had to print it huge to get any of the layer to stick to the bed of the printer, and for some reason, the head retracted back into the shoulders… I have no clue what happened. I’ll make it taller/thicker in the rhino file and reprint when I have a second. Let’s see if that fixed the problem.

P.S. Over our wonderful spring break, we were given the opportunity to redo part of the unrolling, now that we learned paper is very unfriendly. I tried again for my paper earrings, and was met with more success. I wore them all day, and no one called me crazy, so that is a good sign. These may need a third iteration though, mostly for the ink drawings on them. I’d do it differently if I were to do it again!

Lab 2: Cardboard Cutting

Part A: Model a Thing (then 3D print and laser cut it)

Well, I have officially progressed from pretending to be useful to completely admitting my uselessness. Hurrah. In the last lab, I modeled a cute little star table, which could, with a little imagination, be considered functional. This lab, I modeled a mushroom. It actually turned out alright. Below is an image of my sketches, the Rhino model, and the 3D printed model.

While it is “alright,” it is not, in any sense of the word, functional. What on earth can you do with a mushroom model? You can cut it out of slices of cardboard to make a larger useless mushroom! Cool!

But honestly, working with the laser cutter is very fun. I thought I was proud when I held my little tiny star table in my hands, but that was nothing compared to the joy of the laser cutter. The mushroom laser cut is honestly a fairly substantial disappointment, but the joints (I’ll get to those later) are amazing.

The mushroom didn’t turn out very well in part because I made a mistake while cutting my sheet of cardboard, so when we uploaded the Rhino file into the laser cutter, it was just a bit too big. Hence, my cardboard mushroom doesn’t have a well rounded bottom, but I am not overly bothered by that. What annoys me a little more is that, for some reason, the cap of the mushroom is not round. I don’t know exactly what happened between the Rhino model and the laser cutter, but my mushroom ended up considerably flatter than I imagined. My hypothesis is that I either a) lost pieces or b) entered the thickness of my material incorrectly. Because I don’t actually think a or b are true, there is also option c) the mushroom just doesn’t translate well to slicing and laser cutting.

The Rhino model was constructed by revolving one curve for the stem and a second curve for the cap. I used a cage edit on the cap to get some more organic fluctuations and waves. Then, I added the little shelf by projecting a curve onto the stem of the mushroom and lofting it into another curve. Finally, I did a lot of splitting and BooleanUnion-ing to get a single closed object. Nifty.

To do the laser cutting, I used Fusion360’s Slicer app with vertical slices. Initially, I tried waffling (or slicing in both the x and z direction), but it didn’t play well with my model.

Part B: Model some more things (that go with the first thing)

And now I begin realizing that modeling a mushroom may have been a mistake… What goes with a mushroom? Like a tree? I am NOT modeling a tree. No way. So the mushroom was reborn as a… lamp. Naturally. I needed to model a base for it anyway (funny thing about irregularly rounded bottoms is that they don’t tend to stand up. Whoops), so I just used my imagination. I think that if I ran a wire through the base and hooked it up to a light bulb in the cap, this mushroom would provide illumination. To turn it off, you would just pull it out of the base. And then lay it on the floor or something. I don’t know; that is someone else’s problem. To add to my mushroom-lamp environment, I modeled a mushroom-cap chair, leaf candle holder, and leaf footstool. The general premise is melding organic and non-organic shapes to make furniture. This is what I ended up with:

Part C: Wood Joinery (AKA my long-lost love)

Once upon a time, long ago, my family did stuff with wood. I know this because we have a wood cabin some great-great-uncle built, a bunch of handmade wooden chairs, and a super cute little desk that my grandfather made and painted for me (I think). All of this is to say that I believe I have wood joinery in my blood.

Just kidding. I’m just less bad at it than the rest of this. I have a natural eye for what is going to stick together and what is going to fall apart, which is very handy in making joints. This bit was also interesting because it seems more functional than my mushroom-lamp. This is an illusion—there is nothing more useful about my wood bits than my cardboard bits, but it makes me feel better. Also, I love working in wood. It smells nice, looks nice, and has an overall cleaner feel. All of this is to say that I did some joinery, and I liked it a lot. Here is what I ended up with:

How did I get those nice looking wooden puzzle things? Rhino. Conveniently, the laser cutter is about a perfect width for things to just fit together, so I didn’t give my model lines width, and it took care of it for me. I modeled three joints: a 90 degree joint called a “Tenon with Star Mortise,” a simple, flat, star joint, and my personal favorite, a four-way key joint.

I’ll begin with the Tenon: First, I made a rectangle. Then I made another rectangle. Wow. High tech. I liked the look of the rounded edges on the key (which is actually a CMC machine issue and can be fixed with the laser cutter), so I made two circles and connected them with curves. This required a lot of splitting and joining (more than I anticipated), but it turned out alright. Then, I bought my material (1/4 inch red wood pine because the Lowe’s in Dillon didn’t seem to have any baltic birch or staff members I could ask about baltic birch). I measured the width of the wood and made a rectangle on my rectangle that was the same width of the wood and length as the key attached to the first rectangle. Easy.

Next, I will talk about the flat, star-locking joint. I created this joint after looking at this 50 Digital Joints poster. It was also pretty simple. I made two rectangles and put a six pointed star in each. Then I connected the stars with lines, split and joined, and had a star shaped key. I duplicated this and moved it down (to add strength to the joint), so I had two double-star keys. Ta da!

And last by not least, the four-way key joint. This is by far my favorite and also the least useful. Are you picking up on a theme? I tend to be drawn to useless but aesthetically pleasing things. This joint was perhaps the most difficult to make, though still not hard by any stretch of the imagination. I made a long, thin rectangle, then duplicated it three more times, rotating 90 degrees each time. Then, I made the top of the key out of curves, lines, and a small rectangle. I duplicated the key and rotated it three times as well, before connecting it with lines. After joining the center key into a single piece, I made lines from the corners of the four rectangles to the key, then split the rectangles on the lines, and joined them to the diagonal lines. In order to get the whole shape to fit on my cardboard, I needed to rearrange one of the arms, so I duplicated a single arm of the key and joined it to the rectangle part of the arm, making it a cut out. The shape printed well, but if I were to do it again, I would make a single arm and key cut out, then duplicate and rotate that whole thing three times. After I printed this time, I tried rearranging the arms, and they don’t fit well onto other keys, meaning that somehow, the key is not perfectly symmetrical. This really doesn’t bother me that much, but in the future it may be a good thing to keep in mind (and also make the process much faster).

Overall, this lab was a lot of fun, and I am very, very eager to work more with the laser cutter. You can do so many interesting things. On my list is:

Make myself a wallet out of bendable wood
Make a joint out of the tatoo design for my sister
Make joints that actually work and consider trying to model something useful (wow, crazy)

But all those things are outside of the scope of this lab, so I’ll sign off for now!

Lab 1: Quite A Process!

To begin, this lab was really very fun. There were certainly moments of extreme frustration (WHYYY is this mug handle turning concave half way down??), but all the angst was worth it when I first held my little tiny star table in my hands, fresh off the 3d printer. Admittedly, it did not come out at all like I intended, but I am going to try again Friday morning (more on that later), and it isn’t bad for a first try.

So, let’s start at the beginning: how did I go from not being able to work the software to holding a tiny, useless plastic chunk in my hands? (I know, you are astounded at my massive amount of progress. Just kidding. It has been a steep learning curve for me so far.)

Lab 1, Part A and B:

I’ll make this quick: I followed the directions. Rhino (windows version) is nice in that, if you type a word into the command bar, it is pretty good at figuring out what you actually want. So if I want to extrude a curve, it is a pretty good bet that I can type “extrude” into the bar and it’ll pop up. Then, my general technique was to select the command and follow the prompts until something cool looking happened. There were a few tricky ones, where I was clicking and clicking with no cool results (and sometimes nothing happened at all). For example, Network Surface and I are not friends. That took a long, long while of clicking, looking up documentation, and frustration before I finally got a thing to happen (yay! A thing!). Because we were tasked to make two shapes for each command, I would make the second form more intentional that the first (or that is what I was trying to do. Sometimes it worked, sometimes…not so much). For Part B, we were supposed to practice our intentionality by drawing/sketching two of our shapes, then altering them on paper. Luckily, I am a very poor artist, so when I failed to successfully alter my shapes in Rhino, I could pretend it was intentional, and I just can’t draw. That was nice ambiguity.

Lab 1 Part B Sketches — I bet you can’t guess what these drawings are supposed to be of!

Lab 1, Part C:

I literally did the same thing as in part A and B, but with different commands. The Boolean stuff is pretty cool, though the difference between Boolean Difference and Boolean Intersection is still something I am working on. I also really struggled with the ChamferSrf and FilletSrf, mostly because the first time I did it, I had surfaces that completely intersected, so it made some kind of odd holes and angles. Besides that, all good!

Lab 1, Part D:

Making real things! Yay! For my three objects, I made a pipe, a revolution, and a loft. My least favorite was the revolution, so let’s start with that.

For the revolution, I drew a funny fire shape and revolved it 360 degrees, to make a thing that looks like a spiky top. It wasn’t too difficult, but it would be challenging to make part of a system because it has a lot of strange angles. I can’t see much practical use for it.

Next, I did the pipe. Initially, I wanted to make a heart, but after trying that several times and being very disappointed with the results, I set my standards a little lower and decided to make a carebeener shape instead. This turned out rather well, so I went with that. To make the object, I drew the curve, then used the Pipe command and varied the width of the pipe at certain points. It was not difficult.

Then, finally, the loft. I actually am very fond of this. It is the easiest of the three (for me) and I think the most graceful as well. Initially, I made a two five pointed stars and used gumball to lift the larger star a little above the smaller star. Then, I rotated it 90 degrees in the top view, so they were slightly offset, and lofted the smaller into the larger. This was the first shape I printed. It turned out very, very tiny (not surprising—my scale was set in millimeters) and the layers were thick enough that it looked strange. The double star shape is (in my head) a design for a fancy table, so I altered it to make it a more functional table. I made sure that the angles were more realistic this time and adjusted the loft so that the surfaces didn’t intersect. In addition, I used two six pointed stars rather than five pointed because they are symmetric and look more clean with a 90 degree offset. Finally, I enlarged the top surface to make a better “platform,” which improves the functionality of the table. I scaled the model up and printed it on Friday morning (I think it turned out well!). Note that this model is also a very functional weapon. I cut myself on it twice trying to get it unstuck from the raft. I hope I get extra points for including TWO very useful functions: a tiny table AND a defunct throwing star.

Lab 1, Part E:

Modeling an actual thing has been, by far, the greatest challenge I have faced in Rhino. Turns out that my lack of ability to do anything intentionally is an issue when trying to intentionally model a real life object. Wow. Who would have thought? I chose to model my favorite ceramic mug, mostly because it would be “easy”. I mean, it is just a cylinder, right? How hard could it be? Funny story. Very hard. Well, the modeling itself wasn’t too too hard. Getting it to look right has been hard, and getting the photos into Rhino in the correct orientation was also a source of great frustration. After I finally got the images into Rhino with Picture Frame and rotated them into the right place, I started on the body of the mug. This took a fair few tries until I was happy. At first, I traced the outline of the right view of the mug and revolved it. That gave me a hollow shell, but with no opening at the top. Then, I traced half of it and revolved that. Unsurprisingly, this gave me a shell of the cup, but it had no thickness. Next I went through a phase of tracing half the outside, making up something for the inside, and revolving that. It took a fair few tries to get something that looked halfway accurate. After I was ok(ish) with my mug, I moved onto trying to model the handle. For a while, I played with extrude curve along curve, but that wasn’t giving me what I wanted at all. Finally, I caved and asked for help. Turns out that extrude curve along curve won’t rotate the curve—it’ll keep the orientation the same as when I drew it. This leads to the handle being flat and torqued in strange places. However, if I use a sweep one rail with my handle outline and an oval, the oval rotates around the rail, which is much closer to what I wanted. I then used the control points to do a little fine editing.

Overall, the mug turned out… well, I’ll say all right-ish, at best. But that is okay! Progress is the goal, and I moved from being able to only draw lines and getting regularly lost in the three dimensions of my Rhino window to making a cup-ish thing AND a tiny throwing star table!