3D Printing and Scanning

I do love playing around with the kinect2 Jeff and Colten found a computer we could use to play around with the Kinect2 with, and there has been loads of dancing and music making in the corner of our lab ever since. Here's a fish me and colten downloaded and made to grow and move around wherever your hands take it. He'd made a stationary sphere changing dimentions around the origin, and I thought, why can't I be saying, "I caught a fish thiiiiis big!"--so we made it so we could say that, and then so that there could be two people, both with there own fish. And then he figured out how to connect Pure Data to it and started making interesting noises and music as we move around. ANd other fun things. There is now a tiny 3d printed vase made in a shape curved around how Brendan posed. So, that's really cool.

Music making with dancing (playing air?)

Fish in your hands, however large you say it is!

I also scanned my wrist with the old connect that I've already figured out how to work. It turned out much better than I expected, though it took a couple tries. It worked best when I was slowly spinning on a stool with my arm held directly up and the kinect pointed at its level.

This might be the final project I settle on, since I really do want to make a nice looking 3d printed wrist brace for my right wrist that doesn't overheat in the summer. I've repaired a lot of small children's heads in my time: cutting off the scrappy shoulders and closing holes with the default repair tool. I tried playing around with NetFab (free version) to do so with the arm, but I couldn't find any options to leave open a hole in the arm after it has been cut. I'll have to do that part in rhino/grasshopper later. Which would be better workflow in any case.

I've played with some peltier heaters, and think that plus some solar power and it might be great. Might even be able to charge off the melting left over ice, which would be pretty awesome.

Another weird thing I've noticed is that these scanners don't pick up glass. Here's a scan of the computer desk with a glass glass on it--the transparent glass didn't show up at all on the scan, but for some reason its shadow (the amount it refracted light coming through it rather) showed up as a dent in the desk. Cool!

3D printing

There's a toy I really like on Tinkercad community made by a user called MathGrrrl (sp?) that's a build-your-own-gyro. I wanted to make one just like it but much smaller, so I could make fun necklaces, and so could everyone else. Turns out, as I guess I knew, it's harder to print smaller. Tolerances, boo! :)

Since the nubs on which each disc spins are printed inside the holes in which they turn in their partner disc, this is one of those things that additive processes can do that subtractive ones aren't good at.

The first two were the same file, a test for two loops to see if they would freely rotate at that scale.

It first was terrible getting off the raft, so I switched to a non-stick bed and didn't print with the raft.

Since that worked great I went and made two more, then put the fab lab logo in the middle and a small ring to hang it from on the top.

Unfortunately I also decided our printer has great tolerances, so I could pull everything in a lot tighter. I overestimated and got something that wasn't happy. One because of my file, another because I think I had an unevenly heated bed and it had trouble sticking on one corner, so that side stuck together there on the back. The next one worked great with the spacing, but the nubs they rotate on were too long. It still worked, though! I think it's still somewhat a work in progress, and I would play a little more with it before being completely happy. It was very interesting to break apart her design and realize that the rings were actually segments of a sphere rather than segments of a cylinder (brilliant of course!).

Downloadables:

Tiny math fab gyro, and a sample 3d scan