I have been experimenting with different leg materials. Originally I used the ABS plastic but I didn't think that the 3-D printer had high enough resolution to print something with the servo pattern. Instead of printing out the servo pattern I printed out the legs and glued the servo horn onto the leg. That looked very messy so I tried laser cut the legs out of acrylic. The lasercutter had enough resolution but the legs were to heavy and they broke a servo. I realized that previously my printing resolution was set to medium so now I am trying to print the servo pattern and see if it works.

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Test5

I wanted to make an art piece that visualized a brain. I've always been fascinated by neurons. The project is setup up as a dodecahedron with LED strips along the edges and buttons on the vertices. There are 20 edges and 30 vertices. 

The vertices are designed so that 3 edges robustly get attached to it. Intially I wanted to avoid using screws but ultimately decided to use them because I needed a hard connection. The vertices were 3D modelled in Solidworks and 3D printed.  

For the behavior of the light, I wanted pulses to travel from vertex to vertex, then choose a path to follow and travel down that edge. The code is divided into 3 parts: a strip section, a hub section, and a pulse section.

-Each strip corresponded to an edge and kept track of the LEDs for that section.
-The hubs handled the connections between different strips
-And each strip had 2 pulses: one for each direction. Each STRIP would know whether it had a pulse or not.

This worked great, but then I had a problem: from a distance the dodecahedron looked mesmerizing, but when someone got up close, it was hard to figure out what it was doing. There were lots of pulses cluttered it up and they were being absorbed into a hub and waiting. In response to that, I decided to make it easier to track the pulses by adding trails, removing the "holding" and giving the pulses priority when a button is pressed. 

As of now, we are working on mounting the wheels and controlling how the car turns. Mounting the wheels is not as simple as we anticipated. We experimented with drilling holes, threading wire and other different mounting systems. The best model we came up with, was 3D printing a part to hold the wheels wire secure on the base. It is a triangle with engravings for the wire to sit in, it also has screw holes to secure it. We are printing the peices right now. We are controlling how it turn, by a servo turning the front wheel. The way we are doing it, is by mounting a servo on the back to a wire, which attaches to the wheels wire(which comes up through the base). It is the most precisly turning model.

The goal of this project was to create a 3D printed personalized shoe for track races, the shoe would have two different spike plates which could be interchanged depending on the distance of the race. 

The shoe was 3D modeled in Rhino based on a 3D scan of my foot from the Microsoft Kinect, it was 3D printed using black rubber and white ABS on the flashforge dual head 3D printer. 

I hope to continue working on this project, my goals for the future are to create a way for a user to upload a scan of their foot, and have a personalized shoe created around based on the scan. Ideally, the majority of this work could be done by the computer, and a human would only have to do final polishing work.