Category Archives: Updates

Halves X 2

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Over the past 2 weeks we’ve given not one but TWO ”halves” presentations. I say ”halves” because due to scheduling conflicts, these presentations fell after the halfway point in the semester.

Our first presentation was to the faculty at the Media Dome, and served as our official ETC ”halves presentation”. Although the audience was smaller than the average ETC presentation audience, we got a lot of interesting questions and points of advice. It was actually quite nice to have an extended Q/A session!

Our Media Dome presentation turned out to be a great excuse to practice and elicit feedback for our second big client presentation. At our first client presentation, we pitched several of our initial ideas and were able to get a better sense of where to take our project. This second one was meant to be a check-in to show HP how our ideas developed and our progress so far. In addition to showing off our work, explaining our project schedule and discussing our challenges, we also had to make it clear why and how our ideas could benefit them. So after adjusting our slides and polishing our lines just a little bit more, we headed off to HP early Monday morning (November 14th).

Overall our second presentation went very well! The people at HP were very happy with the progress that we’ve made so far and can’t wait to start playing with the prototypes that we are working on! (man, that’s a tease if I’ve ever heard one! We’ve done all this cool stuff but can’t tell you what it is!) So now we’re back to the grind– making the best use out of our remaining time!

Dragon Attack!!

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…so unfortunately we haven´t been able to post as much as we would like. Hopefully we’ll be free of his fiery breath and grotesque stench soon enough!

Ok, truth– we are under a strict Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA), so we can’t talk about our progress past a certain point, or post our adviser newsletters. Unfortunately, we have run out of most of the general content, since we are working hard on our project deliverable, but we will try to post more pictures before the end of the semester (that don’t give away our secrets!).

Wash Day

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As we’ve discovered, 3D printing opens up a new world of possibilities in terms of seamlessly printed and pre-assembled objects. We can create working hinges and joints, objects within objects, and complex designs that before had to be individually created and then put together.
Unfortunately, a lot of these complex pieces cannot be used right out of the printer– they need to go into a special washing machine, aka the Support Removal System, that dissolves the support material necessary to make that piece.

Our washing machine lives in the boys’ bathroom, one floor below our project area. Luckily the bathroom has been turned into a storage closet, so the only other people who have access to it are the building janitors. We had several issues hooking up the SRS, since it was a prototype and didn’t exactly match the washer in the manual HP provided. One of the biggest issues was that it didn’t really work. We would put things in and 6 hours later they would have just as much support material as before. After several days of trouble-shooting and exchanging emails with the support team at HP, we decided that there was something wrong with the washer, and not necessarily with the way we were trying to use it. So last week we got a new washer, that actually looks like the picture above! And best news of all… it works! These are some of our creations that really didn’t work without the help of a functional washer:

Letter-based Rubix Cube (designed by qijie on Thingaverse)
David’s Crazy Balls

Even when the washing machine works, it still takes a decent amount of time (between 3 and 12 hours) to dissolve all of the support material. So, after learning how hindering the washing process can be, we are looking into different printing methods that don’t depend as much upon layers and layers of support material. How can we minimize production time– from the time we press print to the time when our object is ready to use?

Houston, We Have a Printer!

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The printer has officially arrived at the Media Dome!! It was accompanied by a support removal system (aka “the washing machine”), some consumables to test with and lots and lots of excitement.

We´ve found a water closet — literally — for the SRS to live in, and the printer has found a home next to our desks. It makes a comforting kind of hum when working, though it´s mostly drowned out by the air conditioning. It rattled off a test calibration print, which was successful, and the local connection is being set up so that we can get testing with something a bit more exciting…. Expect plenty more photos soon!

 

Newsletter Week 4

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¡Este Semana!
This week was a big week for team ¿Plastico? ¡Fantastico! After two weeks of brainstorming and internal meetings, we met again with HP to present our ideas. The meeting went well and the HP team was very excited with the direction we are heading. We are now starting to delve deeper into some of our technical research involving 3D scanners and printing .STL files. HP is loaning us a 3D printer for the semester, so we will hopefully be able to start working with that by next week. In the meantime, they gave us

some of their extra printed models to play around with!

This week we also finalized our poster and half-sheet designs, as well as created more content for our website.

¡La Semana Proxima!
Next week we will be exploring the properties of the 3D printed objects as well as the reliability of different 3D scanning techniques.

¡Challenges!
We are still working together with HP to define a more specific deliverable for the end of the semester. Since we only have a few months for the entirety of the project, we will need to keep a good handle on our scope and what we can reasonably accomplish.

¡Barcelona Discovery of the Week!
Iberian Ham Croquettes and La Mercè Festival