I am planning to build one of these & wanted to layout out all the parts and a table in openscad to see what kind of problems I might have before ordering any parts. My 1st question is how the Stop_Block.stl works. I am guessing it stays in the same place relative to the Z_XY_Center.STL since it is clamped to the belt. I attached a couple of screen captures of how I am laying this out. Let me know if I have anything wrong so far.
[attachment file=45006]
[attachment file=45005]
Yeah. You can’t home that direction until you home the other first. But it’s set up to work that way by default in Marlin.
That ended up being a bit further away (than I expected) from the carriage on mine, because you need room to tie up the belt. I didn’t really try to fix that though.
Looks good otherwise. What is the red platform for?
I zip that side first and real close and use the other side for tension. There is some room and you should be able to get the center piece to home real close to the bolt heads.
That was just so you would ask a question what it was. Actually, I thought I needed some sort of corner block ( those are probably bigger than needed) to mount the plastic corners to. I have that a variable length, width & width and those are about 3/4"x6"x4" currently. I am planning to pocket screw those in place like I saw you using on your table.
Would it be possible to make that Stop_Block.stl file part of the center piece or is that not a good idea? Seems like with the print orientation you have it should be possible with no overhangs.
I think that might work, but then you would have no adjust-ability. Some cap head bolts are longer or mark had to put the nuts on that side to fit his table.
In my first job out of college, everyone was so busy, I didn’t meet very many people for a long time. I hung a monthly calendar on my wall, wrote “C.S. day” on the last day of the month and started crossing off days.
Them: “What is C.S. day?”
Me: “Conversation Starter Day! Thanks for asking!”
I decided to play with animation in openscad. I get a little confused as to which is X & Y axis. Do I have them in the correct orientation? x0,y0 is at the bottom as shown by the X,Y,Z axis. If you are familiar with openscad, the way I created the animation was to create a 180 sided polygon in draftsight & extract all the coordinate pairs of the vertices using a lisp routine and make an array of them in openscad. Using the $t variable during the animation to create the index number into the array. I then just used that as the current X,Y coordinate.
[attachment file=45869]
Yup orientation looks correct. You are a straight guru with openscad.
Thanks. This instructable on openscad animation was very helpful.
Â
I came up with a better animation using the x,y coordinates generated from the gcode of a spiral with sandify. Here is the animation using 712 coordinates and the image shown in sandify. I cut out half the coordinates to make the animation faster.
[attachment file=45898]
[attachment file=45899]
Â
That’s awesome!
Well exploded views USED to be cool, I think I am going it have to look into some animations. The really helps to illustrate how it works. I love it.
Going to drop that into the build page if you don’t mind?
Thanks. Speaking of exploded views, back in the late 70’s I started out as a technical illustrator drawing exploded views of parts in pen and ink for a logging tractor manufacturer. I spent a month one time drawing all the gears & parts for a transmission. It was kind of fun & had no deadlines, but the pay was not great.
I was thinking I might enter that animation or make a better one for your contest.
Do it! I think I have a cool way to do the voting, should be fun and easy.
I updated my youtube video of this animation to include some audio I created of mountain streams. This got me thinking of how would it be to have a zen table with a shallow depth aquarium of water and a steel ball in the bottom of a little boat creating a wake as it went. Obviously you would have to make sure there were no water leaks.
That’s interesting. The speeds would have a big visual impact. That would be interesting.
I am starting to think this might actually be a good idea. My wife liked it & she works for a marina which might be a fun display to have on a table where she works. Seems like an aquarium would be the logical thing to use for this, but the bottom might be too thick & it does not need to be as tall as an aquarium. Anyone have any good suggestions for this? I found this 12"x12"x1" acrylic tray on Amazon, but I think something 18" to 24" square with more depth than that. Maybe a litter box or some other type plastic container. I will have to take a walk around a hardware store or three.
Trying looking for acrylic frag tanks. They’re typically wide, long, and not too deep.
You could always make your own. You could get a local glass place to cut the glass to size for you, and regular clear silicone is used in aquarium construction. You could also do acrylic, but it scratches easier. I would start small, less chance of it breaking.
w.r.t. the simulator, I keep thinking about how it speeds up at the end. We could at least simulate a constant speed by reading in the coordinates, computing the distance to the next one, and interpolating in between at a certain time. I’m sure you competent enough to handle that, but if it’s not making sense, I bet it would be a fun, quick project in python for me.
