I made a foam board house for an engineering assignment
I finally received a few posters I ordered a while back, including this one of a quote from Steve Jobs
I got to check out a print farm in town! It has been printing nose swabs for COVID testing.
I continued working on some slack bots today. This one manages who can join certain channels. A user can request to join a channel, if it exists a request is sent to the channel for anyone on it to approve, and if it doesn’t exist, a private channel is created and that user is added.
Jumped back into learning swift programming today
Designed and printed a nifty little holder for my Apple Pencil
I finished making a slack bot today like Clippy to welcome new members to a slack channel. Now I need to figure out how to migrate it from Glitch to something like AWS.
New pair of landing gear for the RC plane. I discovered what I was cutting was acrylic, not lexan, so I could cut it much easier on a lasercutter than router. Then I used some molds I milled from wood to heat and bend to shape.
I got some geeky stickers from Redbubble today!
Got to fly my plane today! I designed the motor mount to be only friction fit so if it crashes, the motor will pop off rather than damage it or the plane (as has been the case in the past), but I ran into issues mid flight. The motor popped off, and somehow drilled itself into the fuselage. If also unplugged the battery, so I couldn’t control it. Nothing a little duct tape can’t fix though!
Continued working on some bots in Slack. Is it just me, or does Slack have like 3 different places that document their API, none of which give a full walkthrough of how to use it?
Finishing up a new RC Plane. I crashed the last one but now trying to make it modular so if it crashes again I can just remove the damaged portions. Also I designed and 3D printed cases for all the electronics so they can be removed
Learning how to make a bot with the Slack APIs
Day 4 of the CADathon, I began a piston mechanism to launch yoga balls.
Made some landing gear for an RC plane with lexan. I milled it from 1/4" polycarb, then used a reflow station to heat it and bend to shape. It worked really well for a first try, but I think I’ll need to adjust the size because the bend radius was slightly larger than expected.
Finished making about a dozen face shields today for special ed teachers.
Day 2 of my hunt for the perfect note taking app this school year. @clairebookworm and @rjhangiani recommended Notion, and now I’m addicted 😆. I decided to take it for a spin and take notes of a youtube lecture on smart studying techniques, so far so good!
I went on the hunt for a new app for taking notes today. I tried Atom, which obviously isn’t meant for that type of thing, but I did find a neat package that gives a visual representation (pictured below). Then I found Miro which is somewhat along the lines, but seems to be more for teams. I’m mostly looking for what Pages / word / google docs offers, but without constraints of physical pages (headers, page separation, line breaks not dynamic to screen size, etc), and a way to collapse subcategories. Also any visual representations are cool. Any recommendations?
Went hiking today, here’s a photo I captured on my drone
Continued working on face shields today. I was able to cram 4 into the build plate, but both the thin walls and large build plate make bed leveling difficult. I was able to find the sweet spot on my 4th try. I didn’t grab a photo, but here’s a screen capture of the livestream:
I tried to mod a decommissioned virtual presence display system that was donated to make the ultimate Zoom setup. It has a Cisco codec with their proprietary software which took forever to figure out how to interface with, but I finally figured it out. The camera was interesting, it uses a D-sub connector male to ethernet male cable to control the gimbal, and an HDMI to output data. I was able to plug it directly into a monitor and got the feed working, but apparently connecting it to a laptop requires a capture card.
I got an old Anet A8 printer from my makerspace revived and connected to Astroprint for remote monitoring. Had a mishap with the Z axis limit switch not working, so when it homed it plunged into the build plate and left a dent. Thankfully no damage to the extruding module though.
I won the #osf Hackathon live event today! Shoutout to @winston and the others for putting it all together! Here was my submission for the challenge to build a “spam bot”. It’s an Arduino Leonardo which is recognized as a keyboard and types the word “Spam” a few times a second until unplugged. Now comes the challenge of removing the program without it writing “Spam” in the IDE a million times while it waits to upload new code.
I continued working on my tennis ball launcher. I got both flywheel pieces printed and assembled, but could only find enough quarters to fill half the slots. So far it weighs 650g, but should be able to get past 1kg with all quarters. The hope is these quarters will add enough weight far enough from the axis of rotation to keep momentum as tennis balls shoot, giving more repeatable and rapid shots.
I continued manufacturing face shields for special ed teachers today. I spent a while testing and adjusting the speeds and feeds until I was satisfied, then cut out a bunch of the shields. The only bit I have is an upcut end mill, so I need to use a paint stick and vacuum to hold the material down as it cuts.
I made myself a time blocking sheet to try to have more structure to the day. I’m using the Pomodoro technique to maintain focus, as well as blocking off sections of the day for various tasks. Since classes are looking to be online for the foreseeable future, I’m hoping this will help me maintain focus with so many distractions when studying at home.
Began testing a pair of LoRa radios for a DIY RC plane remote controller. Spent like 3 hours troubleshooting code before I discovered I was using the library for a different style radio. I’m now able to instantiate a new radio object and configure it. Tomorrow, hopefully I can get them communicating and test the range.
Worked on some wings for my RC plane today. Top wing is what came with the plane, bottom is what I lasercut and assembled. It’s slightly larger, and has control surfaces on the wing for flaps/ailerons.
I 3D printed wheel tread for an RC plane landing gear out of PCTPE today. It’s supposed to be similar strength to nylon, but more flexible. Also just as difficult to print with. I tried a new slicing setting: concentric infill, to maintain the radial symmetry. It’s not necessary for this, but later I’m thinking about printing a flywheel which will be spinning over 1000 rpm, so thought this would be a good test to see if it’s viable.
Modded a broken RC plane with new electronics and an overpowered motor. I didn’t give the rudder enough range of motion, so I was barely able to turn before it crashed into a tree and got stuck. For what it’s worth, I didn’t have time to install landing gear, so in a tree was probably a better landing than bellyflopping and hoping the prop wouldn’t snap.
Began a course on simulations in Fusion 360.
I got to try some milling today! Need to cut 0.060" polycarb for face shields. First attempt was on an industrial CNC mill which I though was a bit overkill. Then I tried on a Shapeoko, but discovered the work area is deceivingly small compared to the overall size. I needed to cancel after it hit the edge and got misaligned.
I did some fun math today on finding velocity of a shooting object. I’m trying to design a tennis ball shooter which uses a single wheel and spins it along an arc to get up to speed, before launching at a certain angle. Originally I assumed the velocity of the ball would be half that of the angular velocity of the flywheel, but quickly realized it’s more complicated than that. I did some research, and found what I’m doing to be similar to equations modeling reductions on a planetary gear systems. I got a few equations for determining planetary gear reduction, and solved for the relative angular velocity of the ball and speed of the ball based on the diameter of the flywheel and tennis ball. Then I added the speed of the motor and solved for the speed of the ball. TLDR; A 1200 rmp motor with 6" diameter drum can launch a 3" diameter ball around 10 mph.
I just found out about this feature and thought I’d start a streak! I’ve been working on 3D printing clear face masks for special ed teachers in my district. I print them at my communities makerspace but found it tedious to wait around to print, so installing Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi for remote monitoring. Right now working through installing the image on an SD card.
