OBDF 310: Plotter Drawing


To begin with on this project, I significantly revised my initial definition, I removed the elements of extrusion, as I wanted flat geometric designs for the drawings, I also made the remaining elements far more elegant, I particularly thought the rotations on the arrays is much better and more user friendly now, maybe there's an even better solution, but this was a significant improvement. Nothing to fancy or ambitious here I will admit, but I feel more confident in it's functionality and my understanding of it's elements




The original version is shown above, and my improved definition below



Here's 3 designs I decided to use, as they appeared in Rhino, soon to be drawn by a robot, I think the final one is particularly successful, it's quite dynamic, and looks like a top-down view of a pyramidal structure to me.




I unfortunately ran in to some big problems that delayed my printing, the first is entirely on me, I accidentally used the Rhino 6 versions of these curves I had made at home instead of the exported Rhino 5 visions, preventing me from opening them on the school computers and forcing me to rebuild my grasshopper definition on the fly. It was a good exercise in seeing the value of visual scripting however, as rebuilding the definition only took me about 10 minutes or so. I also ran into this problem with the drawing plotter though:
I had assumed that I had made some sort of error in my definition and spent a long time trying to resolve the issue, eventually though, I realized the issue was much simpler than that, simply replacing the panel with a new one resolved the issue, and allowed me to stream the .gcode
Unfortunately at this point my time had run up, and I have not yet been able to print, I will do so later tonight and update this blog when it happens
UPDATE: at last, the job is done, I had a few additional errors, like using a positive Y axis instead of negative, and whatever happened with this first one:
but after that, the prints came out clean, I used two different designs than the ones I had posted above due to the aforementioned "needing to rebuild the whole script" but I am happy with the end results, they're all in varying levels of complexity and at varying scales and all printed quite nicely.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PROJECT 2: 2D Surface Design

Image
(apologies for the poor photo quality) Initially I had no idea what to look for  in terms of  inspiration for this project, but then I remembered my mom owns a bunch of weird decorative nonsense so I scoped that out to find some inspiration. The first piece is a sort of decorative cage thing that frankly I have no idea what it's for, while flowery, I found it also had a sort of 'solar' quality, particularly in the light, that was a seed of the ornamental design I eventually came up with. The second is from a table cloth, I liked the radial forms, which I drew from but tempered with the simple shapes and the colour-on-black of the third, which is from a blanket.  Initially I had a few broad  concepts in mind (solar, geometric, radial, colour) , drawn from the sources that inspired me, but had no end goal in mind, in contrast to the previous project, where I knew what I wanted from minute one. in lieu of a concrete concept, I goofed around with colour...
Read more

Reverse Engineered Object: Selection

Image
I was feeling rather indecisive about this project, obviously there was a lot of options to choose from, and no immediate choice came, so I poked around and picked three options that I thought could be fun The first option is maybe a more ambitious or hard mode option: the TRS-80 MC-10 a RadioShack (colour!) computer introduced in the 1980s, I tragically do not have any cords to plug it in and see if it still works (and I put the D key back in wrong after reassembling it) but it looks cool. Personally I love the chunky aesthetics of early home computers, the futuristic fonts, and the beige colouring, they're much more fun looking, though far less practical, than contemporary sleek future boxes, and often much easier to open up. This thing is mostly simple shapes, but there is very many of them, which makes me wary, no one aspect presents a significant challenge on it's own, but I think many little challenges can grow into a massive undertaking if you a...
Read more

OBDF 310: Final Post

Image
Well I cleaned up the mesh for the candelabrum and tried again at the intended scale, thinking that everything would go smoothly this time, but unfortunately, it went very poorly.  The printer didn't even finish the final part, instead spitting out a bunch filament all over the place, so far that's a problem but not unresolvable, a single element not printing properly isn't a big deal right? oops no all the problems I had thought that I'd resolved just recurred at a large scale. I suspect this must be an issue with the actual construction of the object on my part, because I've printed it on two different printers, and the previous ones were printed alongside the claws which were perfectly sturdy and functional. I'd like to print another one if I was sure how to resolve this but it's been a week already, and quite honestly I've got not good response to this problem, so unfortunately I'm going to call it. I suspect the meshes of the object are...
Read more