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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