Lizbeth B. De La Torre

This sculpture would show weather in Antarctica for the past 50 years through a cycle of color when it recieves an Icecube. Below is my process:

• Illustrated by hand
• took a picture with my iphone
• Air Dropped it into my laptop
• moved into photoshop, continued refining
• I attemped modeling it in autocad; I'm not so good with autocad!

Characterizing the Laser Cutter + Vinyl Cutter

The CBA group and I headed down to the shop and characterized the laser cutter together while watching a test.

Our Settings for the Laser Cutter are as follows:

• Power: 100
• Speed: 3
• PPI: 200

Laser Cutter Project

I began by creating the parametric pieces in FREECAD, seen below:

I also created an Adobe Illustrator file, which is a software I'm more comfortable in, below:

The Illustrator file gave me trouble when cutting up a hinge piece because the printer recognized an artifact that I was unable to find when going back into the file; I tried twice with another modified file, but no success.

My first attempt with CAD went wrong because I miscalculated the width of the cardboard, but had sucess the second time with a width of 3.8mm

I also made the cactus pieces above in Illustrator, though I have to be careful of using it in case it gives me more artifacts.

I also tried the Vinyl Cutter

I took some pre-existing images from google and ran them through Adobe Illustrator's "Image Trace." It gives a good conversion from JPG to SVG vectors if you use images that are solid shapes.

Here are some NASA stickers and a Futurama, "Planet Express" sticker.

It cuts!

Weeding with the tweezers was satisfying, but I notcied a mistake. The cutter cut a path that didnt exist in the SVG file. After some fiddling, I figured it must come from an Adobe Illustrator artifact.

All weeded and transferred for placement!

Characterizing the Mill

The CBA group and I participated in a tutorial for using the Roland MDX20 CNC mill to create a ciruit board. Our instructions for the mill were as follows:

1. Open Firefox =>Select Mods =>Roland MDX20 =>Upload PNG

2. On the Mill, replace the sacrificial layer if needed

3. Vaccum any particles

4. Add a sacrificial layer with double sided tape, keep it flat!

5. Add a smaller board on top for the circuit board

6. Place on the bottom left corner

7. Turn off the mill, wait for it to home

8. Turn off "view"

9. Use the 1/64

10.Use the 1/32 for cutting out the board

Milling

I began by setting up the Mill using the instructions above and cutting out the board; The PCB I was using was warped, so I moved the origin point to the middle of the board and it worked well. Seen below:

I then colleced the materials for soldering:

1x ATtiny45

2x 1kΩ resistors

2x 499Ω resistors

2x 49Ω resistors

2x 3.3v zener diodes

1x red LED

1x green LED

1x 100nF capacitor

1x 2x3 pin header

And began soldering:

I did have trouble getting the solder to become shiny and had to tape the board down to the microscope to keep it stable.

I programmed this board in Week 7

3D Printing + Scanning
Designing a Shape for Print

For this week, I tested both the 3DWox printer and the Eden Printer. I created this shape with steeper angles to test the capability of the printer, and it turned out there is not too much leeway! Below are my mistakes and different sizes through designing in Tinkerlab; I tried a circle inside a rounded square shape at different sizes; Generally, the shapes were higher quality with the Eden Printer. Images Below!:

Instructions for the 3D Wox are as follows:

1. Open 3DWox on the Desktop

2. Upload your STL file

3. Save the file as a GCode

4. Store onto a USB

5. Check the printer bed for any artifacts

6. Plug the USB into the Printer and press Play

For the Eden Printer, we went an STL file to Tom for printing; The Eden Printer gave a smoother texture
3D Scanning

I began by 3D Scanning my Starbucks cup with the Sense 3D and the lid was not picked up by the scanner; so I asked my friend Rachael to sit for a scan! I printed the model on the 3Dwox after saving the G code; it was surprisingly easy to just hit scan and save the file

Drawing and Milling

This week we designed our own electronics; I created many different designs, but only 2 prints were successful! This is a catalog of all of my mistakes and mostly a catalog for troubleshooting the Mill

1. I tinkered with TinkerCad first to test the waters because I have never designed or programmed my own circuit board. This program is really basic and I should have skipped fiddling with it too much. It doesn’t provide any usable output. I moved into Kicad, which was more difficult as a beginner user interface than Eagle, so I switched to Eagle.

3. In Eagle, I began by drawing the schematic. Our TA, Tomás, gave us great advice about linking the wires to the pins; Here are some helpful commands: In the text box, write out - net - to protrude wires from the pins. Type in - Label - to label the wires.

4. After drawing everything, I moved into organizing the board. In the list to the left, click on the BRD file to be taken to the board. I moved around all of the components and rotated them until there were very few crossing wires. To move components, right click or type - Move -, if it doesn’t work at first, type - Display All - then try to move again. I had things different layers, so couldn’t move unless everything was displayed up front. Before beginning to route, Type - DRC - and change all items in - Clearance - to 18ml (This will give your lines enough breathing room) and change the width of the lines to 18ml as well. Hit apply

5. For my first Design, I tried Autoroute, which is a button in the tool bar that will route your wires for you! Great right? This was my first board, and so I made the mistake of not giving enough clearance. (The 18ml discussed above) when I printed this board, I had routes going around small pads; seen below and the mill did not recognize the tiny lines. Give Clearance and large width on the routes! Also, Autoroute doesn’t try to find your best path, it places routes behind the board; I ended up routing things myself after this

6. After my failure of attempting to fix the drawing (2 days) I redrew my design and reprinted with better results. I also edited the .PNG that Neil provided us with to fix the button and LED; I didn’t redraw this version in Eagle, but edited the PNG itself in Photoshop with good results.

The Mill | What to Do When...

The Mill will not cut out some of my traces: A couple of things could be the issue here. Firstly, make sure your board and surface layer are completely flat. A jagged surface layer could be the problem. Next, make sure the Z-Axis on the mill is not all the way down because the machine won’t be able to drill down farther than it’s limit. I prefer to keep the head of the mill higher, by pressing the up button on the machine, and then just lowering the bit manually until it touches the board. Another problem could be the eagle file. My lines were too close together and the mill wouldn’t recognize them.

The Mill cuts in some places but only lightly cuts in others: Replace the PCB and/or surface layer, it is not flat.

The Cancel button doesn’t work: Yes it does, it just takes a very long time to take! Try not to hit the power button on the machine to turn it off, because it messes up the communication between the computer and the Machine.

To reset everything: Close Firefox, turn off the machine, on the desk top hit the “Stop Server” icon and then hit the “Start Server” Icon again, then open up Firefox and press the Power button to turn the machine on again.

When I hit the origin button, the mill won’t move: Make sure the previous job is cancelled, and that you have calculated the PNG. If all else fails, reset everything

Chair and Stool!

This week I tried to experiment with Rhino because I havent used this software before. I looked around for tutorials online from people that knew the program really well and found this tutorial for a chair and stool!

1. I began by editing an existing 3dx file in Rhino. I deleted the old bounding box, created one the size of my wood board (4' x 8') and adjusted the pieces sizes accordingly.


2. I edited some edges of the chair using the Edit Mode tool and then made sure there were no artifacts left over befpre saving as a DXF file


4. I put the file into my flashdrive, plugged it into the shop computer and opened up Vcarve, through Vcarve, I set the defaults to the following settings:

Board size: 98" x 48" (for cutting, .52")

Board thickness: .47"

XY position: Bottom left

Click on the pocket vectors individually with the edit arrow and hit edit > join vectors

Click on the outline vectors individually and edit > join vectors

Create the pockets as well and click on "create toolpaths" and calculate

Save the file as a .crv and .sbp

On the Machine: Clean the surface, load the wood, screw the wood board to the surface very well. Zero the xy axis, zero the z axis using the metal plate.

On the shopbot software, import vectors and begin milling! Be careful not to hit the "ok" button on the screen before pressing the physical green button, this will break the endmill!

My board cutting went very smoothly, though I didnt make my pockets deep enough, so only one or two of my pockets actually locked together.


As I was assembling, I was able to just drill on top of the trapezoids, but the wood is very fragile and would crack easily, splitting the wood. I wood glued what I could!


In the end, I was left with an ok chair, it would have been perfect if I had accounted for the pocket depth!

Programming the FabISP and Hello World board

This week I attempted to program my FabISP Board from the previous week as well as programmed my new Hello World Board. I am working on a new MacOS High Sierra, 10.13.6 with USB-C. I used my USB to USB-C dock.

For the FabISP Board, after soldering some questionable connections, Oceane was awesome and lent me her programmer! It ended up going smoothly up until I attempted to flash the .hex file. The terminal did not recognize my FabISP. I also tried this on the CBA shop computer, but still no go. I got a solid red light, and did the following:

Connect your board to a programmer via 6 pin header, plug the USB of your board into the computer

Download the Firmware

Unzip the file to the desktop. I renamed the desktop folder to - Programmer -

In the Terminal run the line: cd ~/desktop/Programmer to make sure you are in the firmware directory (“cd” means change directory)

Run the line: make

Run the line: make flash (this gave me an error code on two OS)

Blow the reset pin
Here is my attempt with Oceane's board

For the Hello World Board:

I read the data sheet find out my Pin numbers. For LED it was pin 6, for the Button, pin 10. I followed Abhinavs tutorial.

Connected the Boards: Programmer: USB > Dock >USB-C Hello World Board: FTDI > Dock> USB-C

In the Arduino IDE, go to Tool> Burn Bootloader to allow your board to receive the upload.

I used a variation of Abhinavs code above, but replaced the Pin numbers with the appropriate pins

Upload the code! Mine was uploaded succesfully, but the light did not turn on. Bummer!!

This week I worked on my final project. I 3D modeled an electronics casing for my final project, milled the file in blue machining wax, created the mold with the Smooth-on Mold Max 60, and then casted with the white "liquid plastic".

Modeling in Blender

I began by modeling a casing for my final project's electronics after creating a mock-up of the final project. I dont know if this is actually what it will look like in the end, but for now it will do! Check out how I printed the hand in my final project page. I added the title of the project to see how fine the endmill could get the detail.
Before milling I set up my Wax by hot gluing it to the piece of wood that was provided.
Milling>

Tom gave an awesome tutorial on using the desktop shopbot! I saved the .STL file, imported into ProjectWorks3D and followed the steps. It was much easier to use this mill so I helped as many others as I could. Specs below:

Size: 3.5"x3"x1.5"

Roughing Endmill (.125"): Stepover 40%, Plunge Rate 50.0

Finishing Endmill(.125"): Stepover 15%, Plunge Rate 90.0

I then attached the wax board to the machine with the drill, and did the shop bot setup of zero-ing the x,y and z axis. Milling went smoothly up until I realized I was printing the previous person's file! All files are named the same, so make sure you'rei nyour folder.

I stopped the file in time and reprinted my file right on top and it worked well enough. The hexagon shape is the other file. I also went back and remilled the mold with a new piece of wax and it was way better. The details in the lettering did not come out very well for both molds, I'll try a smaller endmill in the future! For the Mold, Sarah gave a great tutorial! Tina, Oceane and I mixed a sample of Omoo 25 and it turned out well. I cast both my molds with this. (Ignore the wrong safety sheet)
I then casted with "Liquid Plastic" it cured so fast, the first time I didnt get it into the molds in time! I used equal parts of A and B I wasn't happy with the outcome because the text didnt show clearly, so I 3D printed the file to compare

This week I attempted three devices: The Light Detection Board, The Reflection Board, and my own redrawn Reflection board. I made them from Copper Tape on transparency paper (I borrowed some from Tom)

Below are the three Boards from Left to Right:

• - Light Detection based off of Neil’s Hello.light.45.cad
• - My Redrawn Reflect Board based on Neil’s Hello.Reflect.45.cad
• - Relflect board based on Neil’s Hello.Reflect.45.cad

To create the flexible boards, here are the steps I took:

Preparing the Files for CBA Shop’s Vinyl Cutter

• Upload your final .PNG file to Fabmodules.org Under Input => .PNG
• Set the Output to SVG
• Click on Process => outline
• Click on Calculate
• Save the resulting SVG to a USB

Preparing the Material

• Carefully remove the Copper Tape from it’s backing
• Stick the copper tape onto the transparency paper
• Make sure there are no bubbles!
• Put your new copper transparency paper into the machine and lock it down.
• Turn on the machine
• When it asks you to select material, scroll to “Sheet”
• Hit enter and it will find the size of your material. Write this size down on a piece of paper.
• Going back to Corel Draw, change the size of the document to match the size of the material, do this one more time by hitting Print and going into the Roland Printer Settings; click “Get Size from Machine”
• You can hit Print Preview and if it doesn’t look right, place your file in the appropriate location after exiting print preview.
• Once it looks good, hit print! I printed a few on one page.
• Note: The Printer Force that worked for me was 80 and I didn’t have any problems with cut through.

You can remove the rest of the copper with the tweezers in the CBA shop. This was a breeze for me and it removed very smoothly!

I then Soldered all of my boards. This was a learning experience and I got a ton of holes in the plastic of my redrawn version!

I then Began Programming. All of my boards had trouble connecting to the ISP, and I think it was because of melted plastic covering the connections unfortunately. I couldn’t get them to work even after desoldering some suspicious connections. But they look good! I will try again next week.
Here is the error I got from Arduino IDE:

Here is my redrawn Light Reflection Board (Above, middle)

This week I tried to combine my redrawn Phototransistor Reflect board and the Speaker board. I began by upgrading my Attiny45 to an Attiny44, and used the extra pins to add a mosfet, speaker and a 2x2 ISP pin (for powering the 0.25w speaker)

Below is my final schematic and board: I printed my boards on the vinyl cutter by laying copper on acetate and using the following settings:

Speed: 5

Force: 80

Oceane and I also tried using the transfer paper, but it looked to be too “slippery” and mangled the copper when we tried to cut; I’ll try this week with a slower setting! It might be an issue with the speed Oceane gave soe great advice on soldering on the acetate to avoid melting the plastic. This involves tinning all of the pads lightly before adding the chips. By doing this, when adding a chip, heating the foot will melt just the solder. Soldering went well, but the FTDI headers are really weak so I ended up hot gluing them to the board, unfortunately I didn’t have time to epoxy the board. I did two boards in case one of them didn’t work. I hooked the first one up and the computer didn’t recognize the board. I had better luck with the second board and got the green light, however when I tried to burn the boot loader with the Arduino IDE, I got an error message; I also got this message in a previous week. All of my connections looked solid and I wasn’t sure what the problem was. (I’m thinking I didn’t use the correct pins)

This week my task was to create sketches from the design for handoff to the fabrication team. I also participated along various steps of the design, fabrication and assembly as outlined below:

Brainstorm

I helped to facilitate the initial brainstorm with the CBA group to define the machine that we would build as well as dividing into groups for Hardware, Electronics and Software.

Design

Officially I was on the Design team. Eric did most of the modifying of the machine's file, and I was there to ideate what it might look like through sketches and verbally help with problems. This portion took one night and a day to complete.

After designing, my task was to flat pack everything and create .DXF sketch files for handoff to the fabrication team. I ran into a big issue; the script that automatically flat packs did not work! I ended up taking every piece and doing the following:

• Aligning the piece to a fake stock
• Create the sketch
• export each piece as a .DXF
• Package each axis into folders

This took a number of hours because I had to learn to do this manually with a buggy Fusion software. Filippo was awesome and helped me learn this.





There were also some pieces that had to be 3D printed, so I saved the pieces as .STL files and began printing pieces. The assembly team took this over later.

I also helped in transferring the group notes into the group CBA webpage after Alex set it up.

This holiday weekend I switched to an old laptop because of a cracked screen and had trouble installing Python, Tkinter and Serial. I began this week by making a new programmer, because my old one stopped working and also made a new light detecting board that I was hoping would work to test.

I redrew one of Neil’s old Phototransistor boards in order to test out the phototransistor for my final project. The idea is, the phototransistor can detect the drop in the light blocked out by a finger and recognize it as a chord on a guitar. (For playing air guitar)

Unfortunately , when I finished both the boards, Python was giving me issues mainly with installing TKinter and Serial. It seems I couldn’t open even test .py files! I also tried installing the libraries from third parties, but no go. I will try to figure out what the problem is this week and try again.

I checked to see if Python was installed, just in case, and it was

I fixed the Python problem the following week, but it took some time to delete files specifically from Python 3.7. There were a ton of hidden files!

This week I milled and cut out Neil’s existing asynchronous Serial Bus Mother and Child boards to get familiar with networking for my final project. I did attempt to redraw these as “Pikachu” boards, but I didn’t have enough time to really make it special this week. Also, I fixed my Python problem! I had two version installed, so nothing was working for me. I just deleted all of the Python files I installed myself.

Here is the beginning of a redrawn “Pikachu” board:

After milling the boards using Neil’s existing images, I did the following:

• Create two folders for the Mother board and Child board.
• Drop in a hello.bus.45.c and makefile into each folder
• Modify the “node” setting in the make file
• Program each board separately
• Connect them and program the bridge one more time

I followed some tutorials from other students; Rachel'stutorial was helpful. Both boards worked on their own, but I could not get the node board to connect to the Mother. After looking at my board, I realized the cable connecting the two boards didn’t make a good connection, so I fixed it.

Both boards are now working and receiving input! I’ve had trouble with getting .py files to work so I felt really enlightened this week to finally have one that works!

Guitars are difficult to bring on board during space travel, and require some re-adjusting of muscle memory to play. This project is a portable guitar tailored for a zero gravity environment and long duration space flight.

The Process >>