Month: March 2017

So, The Sphinx’s Sundial is a bust.

I got some acrylic and laser cut it into the shapes that I needed, and once I put everything together, nothing worked the way I wanted it to ‘-.-

Breakdown of why I think it failed:
Let’s start with how I went about doing this.

Materials:
– Opaque Red Acrylic .125″ thick
– Mirror Acrylic .125″ thick
– Hot Glue

So, I was initially going to 3D print the inside… BUT THEN I LEARNED ABOUT MIRROR ACRYLIC AND IT SOUNDED LIKE A MUCH FASTER SOLUTION THAT COULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH BETTER (and I guess if I had worked with it enough it may have?)
I laser cut out the silhouettes as well as the holes for the sunlight to enter out of the red acrylic. That looked: Amazing. Like really clean. Laser cutting is really cool.
Like look at how clean those are. I’m really happy about them.

NOW. FOR THE THINGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT TO NOTE ABOUT LASER CUTTING. HEED MY WARNINGS:
– Laser cutting is very precise, yes. But make sure the shapes you cut are the proper dimensions! Acrylic is REALLY HARD TO BREAK. I messed up the measurements on some of my inner mirrors, and so I had to re-break them, since Washburn was closed at that point.
– Make sure that you label the pieces if you’re making a bunch of things that need to fit together like a puzzle. I did not do this. This was a grave error. I accidentally confused some of my pieces with other pieces.

So, that being said. I believe the reason I failed was the inner network of mirrors. It’s kind of a mess.

Now, what I did for this was laser cut a bunch of small 1″ x 1″ squares so that I could arrange them in a more versatile manner. This would have been fine if life was the same as Maya or some other 3D modeling software. Fun fact: It’s not. What wound up happening is that just enough gaps wound up happening in each tunnel for all of the light to escape before it reached the other side.

If I were to do this project again with infinite time and whatever resources I wanted, I would keep the laser cut exterior because that looks super clean. Not much to improve there. The inside however, I’d like to change it from laser cut acrylic to some sort of hollow, bendable, reflective tubing. I think that would be a nice, sealed, easily shaped material to use. I think that would have fixed a lot of my issues.

THAT BEING SAID: THE PROJECT ITSELF WAS NOT ENTIRELY FRUITLESS.

I’m really proud of this project simply because I went really far out of my comfort zone and I stuck with it. If I’d done something digital with some stuff I’d worked with before and just did whatever, I feel like I wouldn’t have done nearly as much experimentation and wouldn’t have learned nearly as much.

I knew that the project was going to be difficult as soon as I started working with it, and if I had the time and resources to go for one more iteration, I think I may have cracked it? But alas, this last iteration was pretty costly :/. Fun fact: Acrylic is expensive. I got really lucky that I got the price I got.

Anyway, if it weren’t for this project, I would never have tried 3D Printing. I would never have tried Laser Cutting. Both of these are things that I’ve always thought were cool, but super inaccessible to a non-hardware guy like myself. But it turns out they’re actually really easy and very effective if you do them properly.

Thank you for giving me the space to explore this design problem. Alas I couldn’t solve it in the time frame, but I appreciate the assistance I received along the way.

Hi everyone,

This week I finished my project. The final design turned out a little different than I had imagined but it still has the same concept. From the beginning, if you remember, I was going with a theme of fire and ice. The wood spirals in an upward manner as fire would and the lights act as the ice.

For the most part the entire fixture is made from the driftwood I had found online. There is a metal rod that helped support the beginning of the design process. The base is a aluminum sheet that I had spray painted black and the light came from Amazon.

The fact that the lights have multiple color options made the sculpture more dramatic but my favorite is still the white light. Below are some pictures of the final piece. I hope you enjoy.

Cassie

 

Hey everyone,

This week I finished building the structure of my piece. Here are some pictures and a video, this time featuring a better camera than my phone (unfortunately for the video I had no stand to place the camera on, so I had to make do with interacting with the piece and filming at the same time so it is not the greatest but it shows what it need to):

And here is the video (no sound): https://youtu.be/NqG4dshcxG0

Overall thoughts:

I am happy that I was able to setup the system that I desired – where one can place an object on a platform and see it change the piece’s color and lighting. If I had slightly more time one immediate change I would make would be to get a brighter LED light or set up a second light just under the platform the object is placed on. Currently in the light, the LED light is less interesting but whatever you place on the platform is clear to see. And under the dark the led light is more interesting but it is hard to see what is on the platform. I would hope a brighter light or second light would make it see both can be seen clearly under darkness (and maybe look better in the light as well).

If I had much more time or a do over, knowing what I know now, I would consider using a material that wasn’t LEGOs. I am not exactly sure what material, but I think LEGOs did not look as good as I hoped.  Additionally with this I would try to build something closer to my original concept had multiple platforms (3-5) and could hold common desk items like staplers, a calculator, etc.

I plan to bring this in tomorrow with coins and a few little figures for people to test with.