This is a post to commemorate some of the smaller projects that I did this summer that don't deserve their own posts.
Puzzles
These puzzles were mainly an exercise in picture editing in GIMP and serve as great little gifts for some friends and family of mine. Just a few dollars and you can mail them anywhere in the nation easily. Also, yes, it just works better with cat images.
Stelley
Freckles
Juniper (with a cone on)
Image from a happy puzzler
Chess
One of my good friends decided to create an entire chess set (board and pieces) over the summer. This was his first woodworking project and a highly ambitious one at that. I told him not to get his hopes up because things always go wrong... and they did. But he still made some amazing progress and I learned a whole lot helping him. I did not learn anything about chess, however.
Above is some of the initial wood we got from Carlton's, the greatest woodshop in Atlanta which just happens to be a short walk down the road from the Invention Studio. As luck would have it, we visited on a deliver day and after helping unload the truck we got some free wood! I got some hickory and my friend picked up some walnut and maple for the board squares and pieces as well as some mahogany veneer for the border.
Close-up of the walnut and maple.
Post-table saw pieces
Post-glue-up
After the second glue-up
Beautiful
Using the drum sander
Close-up of the glued veneer
The border pieces (walnut again) were made with the CAMaster.
I recognize that this is some shitty documentation, but it's not my project to begin with. I convinced my friend to take a ton of pictures so that he can create a great reference himself. I just think that I stayed up past 3:00 enough times to have some kind of claim on the project.
Hangboard
This summer I visited Zion where I did some outdoor climbing. I have been very afraid of heights (sheer drops more than just height alone) for quite some time... though I did rather well on the climb shown below. Perhaps I'm getting over it. It was a decently easy climb, but some difficulty came from the fact that it had a 15 degree overhang. However, without that overhang, I wouldn't have been able to take this really cool picture which captures both sides of the canyon at once even though there was several hundred feet separating them:
That's my brother on lead
A hangboard is a tool that provides a variety grip types to train on. This little bit of climbing I did inspired to design and fabricate my own. Also they would serve as kickass gifts for my brother and another friend of mine who climbs.
Here is the all-important test part (done on the CAMaster)
Rough edge before cleaning with the ball end mill
This is the best result I was able to achieve. I still had some errors (tried to plunge with a non-center-cutting end mill) but I am looking to redesign and get some really slick wood before I run it again. The current and future designs can and will be found on my grabcad.
Motor stand
At the beginning of the summer I acquired some hub motors that were part of a batch donated to the student body from one of the prominent electric scooter companies in Atlanta. The Invention Studio received a TIG welder from out machining mall around that time as well. So, I devised this stand as a way to brush up on my welding and make future testing of the hub motors easier.
Here is some mild steel tubing kept around in the metal room
I made some beveled cuts on our chop saw and sand blasted the resulting pieces clean
Welds are acceptable; putting too much heat into the part though
I cut and bent some sheet steel for the arms before welding them on the base
The footprint of the base came out close to the projection of the motor on the table, nice
Birdhouse
This was actually a group project done for a birdhouse contest at the Invention Studio. We never finished. We did however get close enough for me to bother finishing it up. The birdhouse is supposed to be the very top of Tech Tower (another team did the entirety of the tower and it was very good).
This was my first time encountering true dual filament prints. I'll say they are cool when they do happen to work without failing.
Our Ultimakers were experiencing unprecedented bowden tube issues at the time of printing. It was so bad that I don't even have a picture of a good print on the bed.
Here is the birdhouse in its current form. The masking tape is to hold the edges of the roof together as the wood glue dries. Next is to stain the roof a little darker and print a cap in gold for the roof tip. Sidenote: one of my teammates created the cleanest finger joins I have ever seen in my entire life along the edges.
After the moderate success of the version 0.1 build of the 3 phase controller, I got to work on the next iteration. I was now confident enough to use an IC package with no leads. The DRV8323R was the obvious choice after this development. It can do everything that the DRV8203 can do (and more) in a smaller package. The additional features include one more current sense signal amplifier (this can help with detecting a short or leakage current in a 3 phase motor) and the option between parameter setting via SPI or passive components. This is the VQFN48 package I came up with a list of improvements that I wanted to see in the board: Get an assortment of resistors to change dead time with Correct the spacing for the block terminal and THT capacitor footprints Get rid of all thermal reliefs in the power part of the board Design for greater current flow and heat dissipation Use an XT-30 connector for power Enlarge the phase holes Breakout 3V3 f...
The most notable thing going on right now: pandemic. Concurrent readers may find this beginning boring but that shouldn't be too big an issue. COVID cut off the end of my second semester at Georgia Tech, resulting in a lackluster finish and me absolutely despising remote learning. I was living again with my parents and I was low on motivation and inspiration after being removed from the stimulating environment of campus. I had an internship lined up for this past summer and they did not cancel on me luckily. The company, a startup, was very small and had confidence in the controllability of their workplace. While I had grand aspirations of completing multiple goals and projects during the summer, I underestimated how much time and energy the job would take. This was my first full-time and first engineering job for context. All I managed was getting SOLIDWORKS certification and reading/dreaming about doing cool projects. Another point...
This is the beginning of the blog. I am starting this blog as a means of documenting my personal doings, especially with respect to projects that I am involved in. One of the most powerful motivations behind this blog is the regret that I feel for not documenting my previous thoughts and projects and losing a great deal of it to my horrid memory. After years of resisting any kind of planner/calendar use at a high level, I have finally convinced myself that I would function better if I planned my life out some. As a result of this realization, I have begun to more deeply ingrain myself into the Google application suite, which includes Blogger. My expectations for this blog: The primary subject that I plan on posting about is whatever project I am working on and have made significant progress with. This function of the blog has been inspired by the many hands-on, technical blogs and digital portfolios that I have seen while looking at cool shit on the internet. Ano...
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