Michael Ang

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Eyebeam OpenLab Day 2

Electronics, Eyebeam, Prototyping May 22nd, 2006

Eyebeam OpenLab Day 2Eyebeam OpenLab Day 2Eyebeam OpenLab Day 2

I decided to learn SolidWorks since it’s designed for solids modelling and seems a perfect match for the 3D printer. Brian (another 3D intern) and Michael (the R&D Tech Director) tend towards Maya. Maya seems like the tool to use for dealing with characters and geometry captured from graphics-oriented programs (using the incomparable OpenLab creation OGLE of course), and SolidWorks is stronger on the mechanical engineering side and designing parts from scratch.

SolidWorks seems awesome so far. You build parts by choosing an operation (e.g. extrude), drawing a sketch, then choosing the parameters for the operation. The complete list of operations and sketches is stored as a graph, and you can go back and change the parameters at any time. So for example if you design a box with filleted corners and an inset lip, you can go back and change the xy dimensions of the box and hey presto the box is rebuilt This was something that really frustrated me about SketchUp — once you extruded a circle, for example, you couldn’t go back and change the radius of the circle at all.

To test the accuracy of the printer and the properties of the ABS plastic it prints in I created a 1″x1″x”0.5″ box with two mating halves that holds a colour-changing LED. On one half there’s an extruded circle that holds the coin battery (with a slot cut out to pass one of the leads from the LED). The two halves fit together very snugly — I used “best vertical quality” in the Catalyst settings and this gives ridges along the vertical faces that seem to help. I put in a small tab to try to hold the battery in, but it was too small and broke off when I removed the support material. The battery stays in well by friction fit anyway.

The walls of the box are 0.06in thick, and the LED light shows up nicely through them. The thin walls where the halves mate are only 0.03in thick and there are some gaps in the printed plastic where the thin walls meet the thicker walls below (Catalyst says the minimum wall thickness is 0.04in, so this may be past the ability of the printer).

The Blinky Box feels nice in the hand and there’s something about the translucent-white-plastic-yness of it that’s kind of compelling. The 3D printer is dirt simple to operate and there’s something empowering about being able to create the kind of compound curves in plastic that once seemed the exclusive domain of designers at huge companies. The 3D printer at the OpenLab seems well-suited to making portable/wearable devices since it can make relatively sturdy/lightweight 3D forms (square boxes in the hand or against the body are lame). Definitely need to do experiment along those lines!

Pictures of LED Blinky Box design and reality (time from finished design to reality = 30 minutes!)

One Response to “Eyebeam OpenLab Day 2”

  1. drpritch Says:
    May 23rd, 2006 at 3:48 am

    If you like the graph-based approach of SolidWorks but want a more creative, graphicsy package, you might want to try Houdini from Side Effects Software. Yes, that’s a plug for my employer-until-last-month.

    Houdini is a Maya competitor that takes the “procedural” graph-based approach to 3D geometry. It still has a grungy mid-90s interface, but it’s quite powerful. There’s a free apprentice edition if you want to try it out.

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