How to model a final project

This week our assignment was to model a possible final project. While this should have been one of the least stressful assignments, my indecisiveness made it very challenging.

I began with a list of possibilities.

JD’s unfiltered brain dump

• Poetry Receipt Printing Robot
• Superhuman Exoskeleton
• Interactive Game of 15
• Face Scanning Chocolate 3D Printer
• Turing Table
• Fire Skateboard

After this brain dump I worked on each of the projects to a varying degree of not at all to CADing and making prototypes. These will likely be some of the projects I over the course of the semester.

Poetry Receipt Printing Robot

I wrote this down first because this is a project that I have been working on recently. My friend from Yale really likes poetry, and once I started playing with thermal printers, he got the idea to print poems with them. I thought that this was a great idea and immediately hopped into onshape. I designed a sheet metal enclosure for it with a 3D printed sign on top encouraging users to press the big red button. You can check out the Onshape cad here.

The actual poems are scraped from poetryfoundation.org because I much prefer to read contemperary poetry rather than older poetry. If you are curious how I did this check it out on my github.
After that I used a raspberry pi 3A to convert the output into serial so I could send it to a thermal printer. Here is a first test. After some refining I then printed poems like this. I even laser cut out the sheet metal enclosure. It was barely manufacturable and in the future I will make my sheet metal enclosures into more parts to rivet together. Now I need to powder coat it, do the electronics, and write the rest of the script. While making this I was also inspired to have the thermal printers print out thousands of digits of constants. During pi day I would love to set some printers up in lobby 7 to print millions of digits of pi.

Superhuman Exoskeleton

I did not develop this idea much past thinking, “huh, it’d be really cool to be able to do a world record deadlift using my engineering skills.” My main concern is that the hardware eventually has to interface with my squishy body, and this seems like a recipe to over extend my joints or break some bones if I am not careful.

Interactive Game of 15

In 18.701 the professor used the Puzzle of 15 to talk about the parody of permutations, but as soon as he explained the mechanics of the puzzle, I immediately stopped paying attention and started sketching up my own version of the puzzle. I knew that I wanted the puzzle to be 3D printed, and able to tell when it is in the solved state. The mechanical design was straight forward, but I found it reliably track the pieces. The solution I came up with was to put 4 magnets on the bottom of every piece that was either in the north or sound orientation. This allows me to encode each piece with the magnets. The pieces sit on a grid of 64 hall effect sensor that know if they have a north field or south field over them. By reading from this grid of sensors, a microcontroller can deduce how the pieces are arranged on the board and produce outputs accordingly. You can find my Onshape cad files here.

Face Scanning Chocolate 3D Printer

I am a big 3D printing nerd, but I often feel confined to just printing in PLA. Wouldn’t it be cool to print in chocolate? I think so, and it would be even cooler if you could print a bust of someone’s head out of chocolate. Over the summer this idea came to me while riding my bike, and I thought it would be a really cool thing to do around Valentine’s day in lobby 10. After a little research I found that the biggest challenge printing with chocolate is the tight temperature tolerances not found on other common 3D printing materials like PLA. Too cool by 1 degree and you’ve got a clogged extruder and too hot by one degree and you’ve got a puddle of chocolate on the build plate. I found the Cocoa Press to be the closest thing to what I would like to build, but it uses palm oil based chocolate rather than cocoa butter based chocolate to widen the printable temperature range. However, I did not get around to developing the idea much further and I will put it on the shelf for now.

Turing Table

I have always been a big fan of turing machines and cellular automata like Conway’s Game of Life and Langton’s Ant. The idea is to make a solid wooden table with a grid of neopixels under the surface so that it can run cellular automatas or emulate a 2D turing machine. In order to make the experience more interactive I would like to implement some capacitive sensing on the table top so you can effect the simulations as they are running and I would also like to have a speaker to create an audio experience of what state the simulation is in too. I did not CAD this yet, but it is a strong contender for my final project.

Fire Skateboard

I don’t think EHS would like this one, but I did get around to making a prototype with some springs, a door hinge, and ferrocerium rods. :)

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