Month: September 2018

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A New Tool Part 7

 

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I have a short post because the printer did most of the work. Let’s get started.

The printer took a little over two days to print. It went all right, except one time when the PVC pipe extending the filament holder slowly slipped out. It made a loud sound and I was able to repair the accident before anything print-ending happened.

Cleanup was actually not as bad as I was expecting. As with the practice ring, the slot to accommodate the HDMI, power, and sound needed attention. But the custom eye slot was one of the cleanest to come out of the printer yet. It only had the single most tricky tag to remove of all. After I poked it with a razer blade for a while, my father used a candle to heat a blade to melt it off. I’m a little annoyed some soot ended up sticking, but the artifact I don’t understand is why a tiny hole on the side popped into existence even after a final test print to make sure such a thing wouldn’t happen.

As it stands, I will be painting the eyes at least. This will at least disguise the little hole, but it will also blend in with the camera in case I ever decide to use it as a hidden security camera. One thing I didn’t account for was the paint when making the camera hole. I hope it doesn’t come to it, but I likely will have to drill the hole a little bigger.

Whatever the case, this case was designed for a slightly different Pi. I’ll only be able to use two of the four screw holes, but that should be enough to hold the main board in place.

Final Question: Printing the case turned out to be a full length project. How long do you think I will need to perfect the software?

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A New Tool Part 6

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am covering a lot of progress toward a viable Pacman Ghost head for my Raspberry Pi case. Let’s get Started.

Last week, I was stumped with fixing the a mesh representing my Pi camera. I reached out to my fellow TitanCraft members (Patrion MineCraft server of Tango Tek) and one player by the screen name of Rhyno talked me through fixing my mesh. I ended up doing it my own way, but I encountered a recurring motif of the week, having a real person who knows something in the field or program I’m working in is very good way for me to pull the answer to my own problem out of my own head.

I fixed the mesh and got Blender to produce a smaller cut out for the camera. It looked workable, if only I didn’t have to clean out a little bit of gunk blocking the camera from fitting snugly. The potential issue was compounded in my mind because of the awkward angle I’d need to get at it (from the bottom of the case).

I set that aside and turned my attention to the other big problem I wasn’t looking forward to: the ridge to accommodate the Pi’s HDMI, power, and audio jack. I used a cube in Blender to cut off most of the ghost head and I printed the base of it. To my surprise, while it still deformed, it didn’t cave in as badly as I expected, so I was hopeful a small fix could save everything.

I took both problems into a small workshop I recently joined. Both problems were basically resolved, “Tough,” and, “Tough,” but each one came with a “…but here’s why:…” segment. For the first problem, 3D printing is still fairly early on in its history, some cleanup is expected. For the second, I just need to trim away the junk strands and nobody will be looking up and under at exposed infill, and if I paint the whole thing, like I’m planning on doing for the eyes anyway, the paint will cover the hole anyway. While I was at the workshop, the instructor (for lack of a better word) had me plan my next few steps.

I wanted to learn about getting a support structure to work, but my previous attempt months ago didn’t work. The problem then was that I was trying to print an ugly lollipop on its side and the support structure didn’t do anything. This time though, I modeled up a tiny table and it printed correctly, support structure included. The piece was so delicate I busted off two legs when I took it out, but by then, I already learned what I needed for it.

Also a recommendation from the workshop was that I print up the ghost head at a quarter scale. It worked fine without a support structure, but because it was so thin, the printer left a tiny hole in the top.

I expect the full case to be finished next week. But if the Pi needs an ABS case, I guess I know what needs to happen then. I already ran a simple test where I left the Pi to heat up an interrupted print of the base, so I’m hopeful at least.

Final Question: I’m almost done with the hardware part of this project, and it’s taken a while. How long should the software take?

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A New Tool Part 5

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I bring part 5 of the construction of my Raspberry Pi prototyping platform with a camera. Let’s get started.

I am behind where I wanted to be. It’s the classic game of Hurry Up and Wait, only I waited too long. Things have to be done in order, and all the stuff where 2.5 hands were required feels like it was at the beginning.

It turns out whatever my intended way to measure the Pi Camera was overly complicated, as I was starting to figure. While I was looking to draw some kind of grid and view it at an angle and get help with the whole bunch of mathematical nonsense that produced, all I needed was the distance out and to either side as if following an upper case T. I didn’t even need to calculate the angle proper, because I could just add a cone with the proper dimensions.

The unforeseen challenge in stock for me this week was and in a way still is getting the model to comply. Long story short, Blender wants me to make quality meshes, otherwise it will crash. At least the stress test looks good for the auto recovery feature.

I made several prototype eyes for my camera to peek through. The first one based on the custom model of the Pi Cam had some gunk in there, but when my father was done introducing the razor to it, the piece fit perfectly and when I held it up to the camera, it could see through it perfectly. However, unlike the Blender model, the printed version had a hole where there was supposed to be a thin spot.

I printed up another version, this time on a higher quality and the circuit board bumped back a bit, so far, an extra bit on the camera didn’t need an extra hole I made for it. And that’s where I am now, modifying the hole model, with limited success. At the moment, I’m thinking I can drop some detail I no longer need, rather than keep at coaxing Blender into doing my will for it.

Final Question: Have you ever known exactly what needed to happen and not known what the controls were to make it happen?

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A New Tool Part 4

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am recounting my slow adventures in altering a Raspberry Pi case. Let’s get Started.

First off, I did not reach my intended checkpoint of getting a model ready to print, but I am far enough along, I can cover the specifics in next week’s post.

For this week, I finished Blenderguru’s Beginner’s tutorial and the modeling tutorials where he makes an anvil. I did not follow along, but I picked up a bunch of little, refined tips, like how you usually want to always use four vertices per face unless you intend to use it in a game engine that likes triangles. (Before, I had only heard you want to use three or four, but be consistent.)

While trying to organize, I visited this local, informal technology workshop where my father, the guy running it, and I basically repeated the same things to each other until someone drew a picture. From my point of view, I was hearing “You need to make a cone as part of your cutaway,” meanwhile I had already made a cone to accommodate the camera body. It was only after a while that i figured out I needed to make a cone for the light coming in. I did have a major milestone there though, I measured the bottom part of the case with the caliper in millimeters, and the model for it in Blender Units, and it was just off of a 1:1 ratio. I chalked it up to instrumentation failure and disregarded the two extra millimeters.

My project, as of this writing, has a crude model of the Pi camera loaded along with the Pacman ghost’s head by Darren Furniss on myminifactory.com. LINK When building the model, my father and I overestimated the dimensions each time, rounding up to the next millimeter. I want as little of the camera exposed while still having the whole picture clear of the case. I’m still missing information. I have no idea how wide to make the cone. My proposed method of study is to lay the camera flat on a table and somehow plot out the cutoff between visible and invisible.

Final Question: Plotting out the light cone a camera sounds tedious. How would you calculate it?

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