Tag: 3D-printing

3D printing : behind the scenes

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2020-01-16

14:26

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As mentionned in A solid foundation , we printed our first full-scale sculpture last friday, and it was a success.

We were relieved because there were multiple factors that were not 3D printing-friendly :

  • Our scultpure needs to be hollow, because we need to be able to put all the PCBs and LEDs in it
  • Not only should it be hollow, it needs to be translucent, and thus very thin
  • The thickness should also be relatively constant in order to have uniform lighting
  • The sculpture has several parts which are almost horizontal

Why were these problematic ? Well, let’s see how 3D printing works

Slicing

The first step in 3D printing is to create a .stl… Read more

A solid foundation

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2020-01-12

17:55

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Last week we met with Alain Croullebois, the go-to guy for mechanical questions at the school. We went to his workshop with the motor we received during the holidays : this Turnigy Multistar 4225-390Kv 16 Poles Multi-Rotor Outrunner. We discussed what the physical structure of the Phyllo could look like.

Here is a global diagram of what we came up with :

The mechanical structure of the whole Phyllo

The Base

For the base of our Phyllo, he suggested stacking two 30cmx30cm aluminium plates 8mm thick, with a separation of 6cm between the two plates maintained by 2cm wide pillars at each corner.… Read more

LED’s do some tests

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2019-12-14

19:39

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Yesterday I set out to test the LEDs we received : ASMG-PT00-00001 and LE RTDUW S2WP. The first is a powerful RGB LED, while the second is an even more powerful RGBW LED. They need to be quite powerful because in order to avoid a blurry image due to the motor rotation the duration of the flashes must very brief, and since the LEDs are flashed only once every 137.5 degrees of rotation that means they are off most of the time.

The goal here is to test under conditions similar to those the LEDs will actually be used in : once every 1/30 seconds, they will be turned on for 100µs using high frequency PWM modulation for the colors, and then switched off again.… Read more