Perverse Applications of Science… – Page 10

Rapid Prototyping – Mechanical Iris Diaphragm (New & Improved!)

Last time around I ran into two major issues.

Tolerance between moving parts was too tight. My pivot pins on the inner ring were pretty much jammed into their holes…
Fragility of the part. Using 1mm diameter pivot pins using the detail material (weak) was not a good idea. Coupled with the tight pin problem above, it meant I accidentally snapped a couple of pivot pins off the blades when I tried to rotate close the iris.
Coarse triangulation of the exported STL which made the two rings too ‘blocky’ to rotate freely with each another. My fault, fixed by (labourously) tweaking/experimenting with Alibre’s Export.

So how did I fix it all?

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Cute colourful heart rings!

Heart Rings painted by Peter Paul (Shapeways)

I just ran into this Shapeways Blog Post and couldn’t resist reposting this photo of those colourful ring fest. If you’ve read earlier in my mechanical iris diaphragm post I was just playing around with Alibre Xpress and see if I could design a ring using that, guess someone at Shapeways thought they were cute and printed them out! The rings are painted using a water based paint, I just wonder how it’ll look with an acrylic paint to smoothen out the surface somewhat.

Reverse Engineering the Mazda CAN Bus – Part 1

Controller-Area Network or CAN Bus is one of many automotive communication buses for communications between various ‘car computers’. Information such as speed, fuel consumption, accelerator pedal position is all transmitted between the various controllers of a car akin to ‘fly-by-wire’ control systems of aircraft but I guess ‘drive-by-wire’ is more appropriate in this case.

There are other rival bus technologies include LIN (Local Interconnect Network) which is supposed to be a lower cost alternative to CAN, but I’m not interested in that. Why? My car uses the CAN bus, not LIN, not Ethernet. So lets go about figuring what can be gleened from the communications whizzing around my car!

Aside from CAN bus, my car has a pig too. This photo is from 2 years ago and the pig no longer has the tail or the tag on its ass... — Aside from CAN bus, my car has a pig too (Long story). This photo is from 2 years ago and the pig no longer has the weird thing hanging from its belly or the tag on its ass...

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Rapid Prototyping – Mechanical Iris Diaphragm

Shapeways had a little Halloween special last month where they offered 66% off on their new black detail material. Always wanting to try out some 3D printing for myself, this offer reeled me in!
So I set out to design something in the shortest amount of time and yet would still give me a good ‘feel’ of what 3D printing is capable of today. The time constraint was probably also due to the fact I read about the offer at midnight and wanted to send it to print before I sleep 🙂 Result? Concept, Design, Upload, Ordered all within 2 hours!

Shapeways had a little Halloween special last month where they offered 66% off on their new black detail material. Always wanting to try out some 3D printing for myself, this offer reeled me in!

So I set out to design something in the shortest amount of time and yet would still give me a good ‘feel’ of what 3D printing is capable of today. The time constraint was probably also due to the fact I read about the offer at midnight and wanted to send it to print before I sleep 🙂 Result? Concept, Design, Upload, Ordered all within 2 hours!

Concept

The concept is a mechanical iris diaphragm, similar to those in cameras but on a much larger scale. If you’re a Stargate fan, you would have think this is a much SMALLER scale version of the Stargate iris, then I would say that only has 20 blades…mine has 24!

There’s not much design detail out on the web, or at least no design drawings to plagiarise but I’ve seen enough stargate to try design something up myself…

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