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Modular machine design
This week's mission is to plan and make a machine. I'm in the Harvard section. We decided to make a light painting machine. The whole process documentation is here.
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Light painting machine
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Light painting
I'm always fancinated by light paintings, and building a painting/drawing machine is on my top bucket list. So I suggested our group to make a light painting machine.
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Material
We are using UV light as paint brush. The "Glow-in-the-Dark Luminous photoluminescent / luminescent emergency roll" as the canvas. The light disappears after a while, so the canvas can be forever reused. The ephemeral of the painting makes it unique.
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End Effect
Honghao and I are in charge of the programming and fabrication of the end effect.
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UV Light
The switch at the bottom of the UV torch light is just linking the center and the circular parts together to turn the light on and off. So I Extened the two parts out and used a MOSFET to control its on/off.
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Hack Z Axis Jog
Our machine only has motor on X and Y axis, so we use the movement of Z axis to control the light. The idea is to turn on the light while "milling", and turn off the light while jogging. That means, when Z changes, the light toggles.
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Z Axis from ChiliPepper to TinyG
At first, the Z axis output also changes together with X and Y axis. Later we found out if we put them into "only turn on while moving", they won't affect each other.
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Reduce current, Smooth voltage
We used a large resister (not a beautiful solution) to reduce the current coming out from the 24V Z axis output. We smooth the signal with a capacitor and in the code.
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Code
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The final board with TinyG
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Pinhole
Joe stopped by and reccommended we add a pinhole filter to the end of the flashlight to get finer resolution. This worked great.
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Design Toolpath
After assembled it all together, I designed several toolpaths to test this art piece out. I used Neil's mods to export the G code and uploaded them to Chilipepper.
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Lightening Neil
To tribute my gratitude to Neil's wonderful class, I made my first try with Neil's face.
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Light Art
Paint Neil
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Paint Doge
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Paint Art
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Light Corbu!
I cannot wait to paint a portrait for my beloved puppy Corbu! He seems very confused though, I'll take it as a like.
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Doge
This painting shows that our Z jogging light control works perfectly!
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Give full credit to Corbu for building this machine together!
He needs some sleep!