Additive Manufacturing

For Additive Manufacturing, I designed a 3D printed plant-pot holder which would house the electronics of the project. This design boasted an indent on the top where the plant pot would be placed and had a hole so that a UV light strip could be a gooseneck stand for a microphone to encourage plant growth.

The 3D design was created using Fusion and sliced using PrusaSlicer. In Fusion, I started by creating sketches for the general shapes and parts of the design. This included a sketch of the OLED, Joystick, Neopixel ring, plant holder, and other features. In my original design, I encorporated an indent inside of the box where the circuit board could fit snuggly, however with the unreliable performance of our desktop mill, I had to use a student's personal mill, and was unsure if I would be able to properly cut out the design for the outter cut for the circuit board.

Subtractive Manufacturing

For subtractive manufacturing, I was planning on both creating a circuit board and using our school's Epilog Laser Cutter to design some wooden decals for the side of the plant-box. However, our Epilog Laser Cutter had to be moved to another building and there was a problem with the air compressor, resulting in a broken lense. Since we did not have any back-ups, I was unable to use the machine, so I decided to use the vinyl cutter instead.

As I described earlier, this product was made with my girlfriend in mind, and thus I decided to use two seperate designs for the vinyl cutting. The first would be for the Pomo-Pal I would use and included a vinyl anvil, while my girlfriend's had a vinyl bird. I found a design on the internet for the anvil and the bird, and added them to illustrator, removing their background with the image trace tool. I then set up the vinyl cutter and Sure Cuts Alot, the software we use for vinyl cutting.

Soldering

This project involved an extensive amount of soldering, since I was milling my own boards and making two separate modules. I used both hot air gun soldering and the soldering iron. This process took surprisingly long, and was quite convoluded, since I had so many components that used a ton of pins on the ATTinys. Since I used an RFM69HCW

Networking

It took me a while to decide how I wanted the networking of my design to be performed. To me, there were three main options which I will detail below:

Given these, I felt that it would make the most sense for my application to either implement Radio communication. Although I would love to tinker around with Mesh Network, and feel like it would be super cool, its need for high user density to have a reasonable connection distance. And in the case of the internet connection, creating a SQL backend, and an API for the devices to communicate through would involve an extensive amount of software development, which would force me to focus more on coding than fabrication, which is not my goal with this course. I have created a similar project before with an SQL backend and Flask front-end, and feel that although this is in my skillset and abilities, it would not properly exhibit what I have learned in this course.

Moldmaking and Casting?

I decided to create resin rings to use for the Neopixel LED ring in my design. I spent some time creating a 3D model in Fusion of the top of the box, and slightly adjusted the proportions in order to make sure that the resin would fit perfectly and I would be able to 3D print the design and use it as a cast. I then collected the 3D print and after applying a coat of spray to decrease adhesion to the print, jI filled the design with resin.

Unfortunately, I was still unable to separate the resin from the cast, and thus ended up having to scrap this part of the design. With more time, I would have been able to make a proper silicone cast, and casted the resin into that, however I was experiencing an intense time crunch, and thus was hoping that this shortcut would work (it did not).