#I want to try to focus more on my rigging stuff and lack of desk space is a big factor

[foldingfittedsheets]

I essentially just got an anonymous tip that another store might be interested in having me on their team and that if I put in a word with the district manager I might switch.

The bummer is I genuinely like 90% of my current team but the one guy I hate I keep getting shoved into close proximity with makes my life infinitely worse. I like working in the small store because it’s got space for my laptop and an Ethernet cord. But I’ve been shoved into the small store for 75% of my shifts and it’s starting to really suck.

The new option still has a somewhat dicey coworker though I don’t think I’d have as much friction with him, and it’s gratifying that the store manager dropped hints that I’d be a desirable addition. The minimum pay is also higher at those locations, but probably less in commission.

Sigh. Debating between the devil I know or taking a chance on swapping. Nothing would happen until after the holidays anyway but if I want to jump ship I’d need to speak up because another person in my area is angling for that store, too.

[northwest-cryptid]

How are the 3D modeling and printing exercises progressing?

To be totally honest, it's not progressing as much as I'd like. Around the start of the new year I unfortunately developed a medical issue we're not 100% sure how to identify yet. We've spoken with doctors on the matter and I'm currently on a ton of meds for the symptoms. That being said I'm still not functioning as well as I'd like to be, I get horrible sudden spots of vertigo and lightheadedness along with frequent headaches, blurring vision; and general body pains. We believe a core contributor of the problem to be black mold that has been growing in our walls for some time now, with other contributors being everything from asthma to anemia and potential infections in my jaw which are making it near impossible to eat and drink without severe pain.

The unfortunate result of all of this is that I have little time to actually sit down and focus on things as much as I'd like to. When I do have time I find myself debating over what to spend that time on, I have a lot of hobbies and some of them demand more of my time or energy than others. I have been meaning to stream for the last whole month, I often find myself saying "I'm planning to stream tomorrow" or some such and then tomorrow comes and I literally can't get out of bed. Some days I want to sit down to work on art or modeling or stream assets; only to find that it's hard to even sit upright at my desk.

On a less depressing note, I have been trying to dedicate some time towards digital 3D modeling rather than simply developing 3D models for exclusively printing purposes. A key difference being how things are constructed; with digital modeling if the model is only being used for things like VR or Streaming purposes it can lack a lot of the core support features that help a model print and stay upright when dealing with that pesky thing we call gravity. When you're designing a 3D Print you have to take everything into account like weight of parts, support structures, and generally how everything is going to connect. Things can't clip through each other and everything needs sturdy connections. We have a saying in our household that all prints need to be "thick and printable" (a variation on the "submissive and breedable" meme) where as with fully digital models a piece of the model could be loosely attached or simply not attached at all and have no issues provided I do my job rigging everything correctly.

I'm working on some animation shorts, stream assets, and hopefully getting some stuff developed for VR in the future. While I may be progressing much slower than I'd like; I'm still alive and kicking so I don't want to let poor health keep me down. I wish I had some examples of what I'm working on to show off, but I will have plenty to show soon enough, I might have to figure out a time to show some stuff on stream or something.

[markjsaterfiel66]

Look, up in the... ceiling!

Like millions of people around the world, I spent the first month of the summer watching as many World Cup matches as I could blast at my face. (Allez les Bleus!) But unlike most, I spent a large part of that time watching the often dizzying Cable Camera feeds. Now we all know that overhead shots and UAV-style video are big right now - try to find a decent real estate listing that doesn’t have a drone shot of the property. However, people tend to get a little squirrely when there’s a drone buzzing overhead indoors. So I wanted to see if I could make a fast and simple Cable Cam unit - the hacker’s version of what I had been watching for a month - using a few parts and a 3D printer.

Eye in the sky

I have been working in 3D computer design for a really long time. How long, you ask? My early 3D design and animation work was done on an Amiga 500 computer. It was, at the time, quite a bit more advanced and a lot less expensive than anything else being offered. I’ve worked with, among other programs, Sculpt 3D, trueSpace, TurboSilver, Imagine, Lightwave 3D, Blender, Vectorworks and SolidWorks. Most of these programs are either outdated, not ideally suited for this particular task, or prohibitively expensive for the average hobbyist. So I thought it was time to learn another modelling program that is more readily available, and well suited for this particular build.

Fusion 360 seemed like an excellent choice. And while the trial version does have a countdown clock with number of days until you need to register (at a cost of $310 a year, or $1535 for Fusion 360 Ultimate), if you are a student, teacher, educational institution, hobbyist or small business making less than $100,000 per year, there is a free license that you can use. And you still get the full program. A sweet deal, really!

Billiards, 1991, designed in trueSpace; safe with robot safe cracker, 2016, designed in SolidWorks

3D design is really just a series of adding and subtracting shapes to achieve your desired object. Want a box? Start with a rectangle, pull it up into a cube, then remove a smaller cube from the middle. Voila, a box! Want to add a screw hole? Remove a circle from it. In its simplest form, this is the essence of 3D design. More advanced designs will get into deformation, mirroring, extrusions and a ton of other options, but everything you 3D print is ultimately just a combination of more basic shapes.

Opening up Fusion 360, the user interface is fairly intuitive. Admittedly, it helps me a great deal to be as familiar as I am with general 3D modeling. Knowing the difference between a chamfer and a fillet, or a revolve and a sweep, allow me to move quicker, create faster and get less frustrated trying to figure out how to get the program to do what I want to do.

It’s one thing to know that you don’t want two faces to meet at a hard right angle, but rather, have a soft curve between them - but modeling will be much easier and quicker if you know that a fillet will do just that. That all comes with time, and there will be frustration along the way. But you can always undo steps, and try something else, and undo that and try something else until you get the desired result. In fact, Fusion 360 has a timeline of each step of your build along the bottom of the window. You can go back to certain steps and remove them, move through the steps, or even play through them using the play button next to the timeline.

The 3D environment in Fusion 360

A quick search gave me an idea of what a Cable Cam might look like. From there, I created some shapes, basing their size on components I planned on using, chief among them my cheap sports camera and our Pan/Tilt Bracket Kit. Some of the known objects I planned to use already had existing 3D models, like the Right Angle Motor and the Servo Motors. GrabCad is a great resource for existing models, and they are free. For higher end stuff, you can try sites like Turbo Squid, whose models range from free to, “Well, if I sell my car…”

The components that I created were the main body of the unit (in two halves, left and right), the drive pulley on the DC motor, the two idler pulleys on either side of the unit, and the DC motor support. To make sure I was creating things in the right size, I also made models of the pan/tilt bracket and the Lithium Ion Battery Pack - 2.2A, as well as the Thing Board itself. I did all of this simply using calipers.

The printed parts, with hardware installed. I didn’t bother cleaning them up with acetone, just straight from bed to build

As my focus for this build was more on the 3D printed elements than the electronics, it admittedly is not the most elegant of solutions. But the aim was speed and simplicity, which I think I achieved. A Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing and a TB6612FNG Dual Motor Driver run the whole operation, along with a pair or servo motors and a DC gearmotor. I’m using the 2.2Ah Lithium Ion Battery Pack for its 5V output, and the Blynk app made control a breeze.

The very simple setup

If at first you don’t succeed…

My first attempt used a Right Angle Hobby Motor because I knew it would be simple to mount (and I had one on my desk within arm’s reach). This proved to lack the torque needed to move the Cable Cam consistently, but also gave me a little insight on the drive pulley. While there were times when the motor would simply stall, there were also times when the drive pulley would slip, so I wound up adding a bit of texture inside the drive pulley for its final build. And by texture, I mean cool spikes! And I switched the motor to a 90RPM Micro Gearmotor.

So punk!

At first I thought I would have to alter and reprint the entire frame. However, looking at the housing for the new, smaller motor, its placement dictated that it would be simpler to just create a small extension that attached to the back of the existing frame, onto which the motor housing could easily be mounted. I also placed the battery holder on the front to better balance the unit, and added holes so that it would also be possible to use the Pi Cam and the smaller pan/tilt bracket. This could allow for streaming video, but that’s a post for another day.

The Blynk app main screen, and setting screens for both widgets

The Blynk app is incredibly intuitive to use. Add a widget, set what that widget does, connect to your project and Bob’s your uncle. You’ll notice that I have the rig speed range set from 0 to 100. In the code uploaded to the Thing, we map this to a range of -1024 to 1024. The reason for this is twofold; the Blynk app won’t accept a negative number for this output range, but the motor driver uses positive integers to travel one direction, and negative integers to travel the other. And the reason I didn’t use a range of 0 to 2048 is because I wanted the center range, where the motor sits idle, to be a bit easier to hit. I also make sure that the rig speed control slider is always at center on startup, so the Cable Cam doesn’t immediately take off.

You can control the rig with one hand whilst petting a pup with the other!

So as you can see, the servo motion is a little jerky, and it causes a bit of swing on the cable when it moves. In addition, the travel speed was much slower than I had hoped. But over an eighty foot span, quite a lot of pressure was placed on the motor. I’m also under-powering the motor by a lot, so a boost regulator would probably do wonders. Another option might just be to use a continuous rotation servo for the travel motor. But since this build was more about 3D printing the rig than creating something that FIFA or the NFL or even the local theatre is going to be clamoring for, I think it was a success.

The toughest part about 3D printing is the design phase. Lots of people get a 3D printer and then just download existing files to print. That certainly has its place, but the first time you visualize something that doesn’t currently exist and are able to design it on the computer, and a few hours later be holding it in your hand… well that, friends, is a feeling that stays with you. Now go out there and start seeing the world around you as the collection of primitive shapes that it is!

Where it all began - my very first 3D print, circa 2013

You can find a wishlist of all the parts here.

Code and .stl files are in this Github repository.

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