Interlocking Wood

At Burning man this year I saw some amazing structures made form interlocking pieces of wood. They had the benefit of being both ridged, 3 dimensional, and didn't required power tools to set up after being cut. The previous year I saw the work of Greg Fleishman  who designed the temple this year, and coincidentally also met Rob Bell who makes the Zome structures a few months later. This tool-less construction intrigued me and I decided to try my own go at designing interlocking structures.

First I looked at what I had seen Bell and Fleishman make, which is a panel with a joint piece, and copy some of their most basic work. Many of the pieces they concoct are angular, curvy, and multi axial. I started with a Box.

Usually, I jump into sketch up and start hashing out ideas. THis turned out to be less helpful than I expected, since the object I was creating required more attention to the connection points than the shape itself. So after playing paper, which was hard to find in a computer lab, I settled on a rounded box like object that had 4 radial vertical C's with 2 circle horizontal slabs.

Using illustrator, which I do not recommend, I sketch the cut lines, and realized my material I was laser cutting was the crux of the design. The intersections had to be the same width or the locks and hold with friction (or glue) or the pice would fail to hold rigidity. Using chip board, that was 1/8 inch thick I measured the slots, and saved my file as a pdf. It took 8 tires to get the sizing right. This is the part where I don't recommend illustrator - using a non unit specific vector file format took several tried, even after attempted measuring with the cut program, and scaling. 

In the end though, it's a cute little wooden cub. 

ATX Board Mount

Today I made a holding mount for an ATX mother board (part of a larger project which I'll detail in a little bit). ATX; which stands for Advanced Technology eXtended (wiki) is a common motherboard layout for desk top computers with easy access to the CPU and RAM. The project which I landed on, required 4 boards to line up and run at the same time, in what would otherwise be a server rack. 


My design constraints for the board itself were to mount the board, so that it could be removed if needed by it's mounting points. ATX boards and other mother boards come with hole specifications that show standard points what a manufacutere of a mounting plate (usually inside a desktop) can configure so that a typical board can be placed. I found this hole chart online with a quick google search.

It got somewhat funny after this. This file is a PNG ( or Portable Network Graphics ) (wiki) which is a raster file that uses a dot matrix format for it's image orientation. I will be using a laser cutter to precisely cut holes in the board that I need to mount the ATX board on, so I had to convert it into a vector file that the laser cutter needs to cut paths, rather than the bit map that the raster file is made of.

In an engineering perspective this becomes a little messy- luckily the chart show above gives measurements, so I can replicate the whole file without relying on the possibly resized and inaccurate bitmap PNG file.

Using a vector based art or Computer automated design (CAD) program, such as Inkscape, adobe illustrator, solid works, or autocad; you can follow the spacing (with measuring tools) and place the cut holes (which are also specific- I had 1/16 inch holes to cut). The board I was cutting had 10 holes in a 12 by 9 area, so following the measurements I placed (centered the holes) the cutes, and loaded them into my laser cutter.

I like to practice on cardboard before I use expensive material (which is the picture you see above) to make sure the cut is correct. The power settings vary for material type to material type, and cardboard is a lower power setting than acrylic, but I can see if I have any design issues that way.

After the cut, I place the AT board, and line up the cuts with the screws to make sure that everything fits and is scaled correctly!

Tomorrow I'll be cutting the acrylic, and attaching the board.
-S

Bike Lights!

This past Friday I attend a class at Noise Bridge held by Merlin on making bike lights!

A night time requirement, bike likes are relatively expensive for what they are; A battery, resistors, wires, and a few LED's (usually costing $20 for some reasons). A much simpler solution is to just make your own lights.

LED Strips like the ones in the picture above are sold by the meter, and can be cut at in 1'' to 2'' segments. Soldering the wire to the appropriate contact pads ( which have RGB elements, and can emite 12 different colors), and connecting the wire to a switch (unless you prefer to just take the battery out).  the system is ready to go. LED projects are relatively easy, most of the effort stemming from your skills soldering.  

With larger batteries, bigger lights, and more controllers, light projects only get bigger and bigger! 

Happy Making! 

I'm getting better at this: This is a pice of art that's at Stanford. It was a scan done by Matter Port, who requested a print.

I used the Up 3d printer at Noise Bridge hacker space in the Mission (San Francisco). There are several 3d printers there, such as a Maker Bot Cupcake cnc, and 2 or 3 Repraps. I also learned to make ABS liquid by mixing disregarded (abs) parts with acetone, then smearing it on the print plate.  Certain printers use a tape film, which can work (but didn't this time).

Also played with a vinyl cutter, but that's for another day!

I'm printing a part for a boat that I'm working on. Here are 3 attempts at prototypes, one might work, just to show various states of 3d printed parts, and the difficulty that comes with them.  The black ones both fell off the stage, and the white part slipped a little in the beginning. I had a funny talk with a friend about modifying them, post print - which to his perspective is stupid; I should just print a new piece! 

From drawing to object

I needed to redesign a part, but didn't have it in my hands so I found the manual and took a picture to sketch then pice it together. 

This was a PNG file, not a vector, so I was a little skeptical of it's accuracy  but it seemed "close enough." After sketching, then popping it out (aprx 5mm) I took each pice and pieced them together. 

The result was about 80% there. 

And left room for minor ajudstments 

You can see the of pieces here. 

The end goal is to now modify the pice to add a new component. Which is turning out to be more of the opposite of what I started out to do (make a holding structure) but to put all the components in and then make the Stand. 

!/2 a Brains

Ran out of juice, but here's the brain that I printed yesterday!