Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am continuing coverage of my new prototyping tool. Let’s get started.
I didn’t get as far as I thought I would this week. The mission this week was to get the top all printed, but that didn’t happen. The problem was that I didn’t already have all the skills to accomplish the task already, mainly proficiency in Blender. That’s my goal for next week, learn Blender well enough to finish modifying the upper half of the case.
As for what did get done, I managed to start developing the camera mount. The case I’m printing for my Raspberry Pi is based off a PacMan Ghost, printed in red. The first print, I used Blender to isolate the target eye from the rest of the 3D model, and printed it on fast. It took about 20 minutes, as opposed to a full day plus if I were doing the regular top on a respectable quality level. I drilled a hole in the printed piece and held it over the camera, using larger and larger drill bits until I didn’t see a red plastic border anymore.
For my second draft, I added a cylinder mesh in Blender and scaled one end down, forming a truncated cone. I used a Boolean filter on difference mode to cut out a hole for the lens. It didn’t fit well enough, so I printed another one with a more embellished cone.
My father taught me how to properly use a Vernier caliper. I already knew about the outside and inside edge measurement spots, but the the depth on the end of the ruler was new to me. Also new to me was the use of the Vernier scale; I never before got the idea that the extra marks on the slider were offset just a little bit. I think I had heard about the extra digit of precision, but only now did I get that only one was supposed to line up at once.
I used the caliper to measure up the camera. The plan from there is to model up a crude representation of it in Blender and use that to design the hole before I try printing up another pass. Giving some new thought to it, I want to angle the camera such that the ghost is looking at you, instead of “using peripheral vision.”
The next step may be boring, but it’s something I need to do. This week, I need to actually watch a few video tutorials on Blender. I already want to go through the videos by Blender Guru, Link to his channel. I’ve already tried going through his videos on the basics of Blender before, but I kept getting distracted. And no wonder! I just added the length of the videos I think I’ll need, the core Blender basics and the modeling basics, and it came out to almost six and a half hours! And most of that is in 45 minute chunks. The basic tutorial includes lighting and rendering tutorials, so in theory I could skip them for now, but I really should know how to use them.
Final Question: I’m at least somewhat likely to get more than one Pi computer in the foreseeable future. What kind of case should I search for to print up for the next one?