This week I decided to work on making a small 3D printed boat, and 3D printing the same. This is also for Week 1.

For my final project I am thinking of making a solar powered boat - drone system. The idea is that the boat would serve as the main transportation vehicle for the drone across the United States/across oceans.

By flighttime + transmission constraints, drones have a maximum range of about 5 - 10 miles. This makes it challenging for environmentalists and researchers to explore distant regions aerially without physically going there.

Fortunately the United States has an extremely dense river connection system. See the infograph below. A solar powered boat could go along these rivers, and when close enough to a desired destination, could stop and launch its drone. The drone could do whatever exploration/monitoring/surveillance it need do, then return to the boat.

Furthermore, the idea of a solar powered boat has been achieved many times. For example, Damon McMillan (MIT c/o '2000), made a small, 50 lb boat known as the seacharger seacharger powered by solar. The vehicle was able to complete a 2,400 mile journey from the San Francisco Bay Area to Hawaii over 41 days on solar power.





This week I 3d printed a small boat. The boat has two hulls and a stand on top, where the solar panels would theoretically sit. The drone would also sit in the small square holder, where the main electronics of the boat would exist.

The first design I made is shown below. However, I decided to change it, after seeing what a friend of mine had worked on in the Arcturus boat team.
This boat design was inspired in part by MIT Arcturus, a team which creates RC boats.
The CAD is shown below
The 3d printing of the piece is shown after

The boat floating on water is finally shown>

In truth, the boat is held up partly by surface tension. Pushing it below the water causes it to stay below the water, suggesting it has insufficient buoyancy. Backup Video Link Future iterations of the boat will be made! Relevant fusion file is here.

3D SCANNING

I decided to scan myself for 3D Scanning, specifically my head.

To this end, I sat in a spinning chair, and slowly rotated myself with my feet while being about 1-2 feet away from the scanner.

Unfortunately the scanner wasn't picking up my hair well. Changing the scanner to 1) Dark Mode and 2) Adding substantial talcum powder to my black hair helped resolve this.



The scan is shown below. I then put the file into fusion, repaied the hollow mesh, and started it on 3D Printing!

A downloadable stl file is available here.