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EXPERIMENTAL DIGITAL FABRICATION

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  week one  For this project, I was part of Group 3, along with Vian Dallas. We decided to modify a CNC machine to expand its capabilities, we enjoyed using them and felt confident in pushing their boundaries without overwhelming ourselves. Our goal was to transform the CNC machine into a drawing tool capable of handling five different mediums. We divided the workload evenly, making sure that each of us had a manageable section of the project. My part was to design the pen holder something that initially seemed simple but quickly became a challenge. my ideas.  Vian ideas  Dallas ideas  Brainstorming with all our ideas together  I found inspiration in an unexpected place, my hair clip. While brainstorming ideas, I was playing with my hair clip and noticed how well it clamped onto my finger. This sparked the idea of modifying it into a flexible holder capable of securing different-sized drawing mediums. week two  Despite the setbacks, I kept refining t...

NONLINEAR FDM TOOLPATHS

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 My first thought was to repurpose some curves from a previous project and build something layered with extra material. But once I got started, I just wanted to see how weird and organic I could make it. Turns out, pushing a 3D printer beyond its usual clean lines is a lot more fun than I expected. I based my design on a butterfly chrysalis (cocoon), organic, textural, and a little unpredictable. But getting that texture to actually show up in Rhino was a struggle. I redesigned it so many times trying to make the curves translate into something interesting when printed. At some points, it was just frustrating. But once I finally had something I liked, I knew I wanted to explore this kind of structure even after the assignment was over.  (There was a lot of redesigns)   I don’t know what it was, but my G-code just would not cooperate. I kept running into issues, and honestly, by the time I got to printing, I wasn’t even sure it was going to work. Thankfully, Brian was the...

CNC drawing

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So I tried CNC drawing twice, and both attempts were definitely a learning experience. The first time, the middle section of my design had really delicate details, and the machine went over certain areas too many times. It actually messed up the drawing so much that it nearly ripped through the paper. I probably could have used a softer pen or marker, but I wanted fine details, which meant I needed a sharp tip. On my first attempt, I also had the settings completely off, which caused the machine to skip a lot of intricate details. The way I originally organized the G-code made the process pretty messy I had planned for one section to be completed before moving on to the next, but I quickly realized that some parts of the artwork needed to be sorted by the Y-axis and others by the X-axis. So, after that first run, I went back and redid the G-code, organizing certain sections differently. I also change the desighn just a bit to help. This actually helped a lot because it let me control w...

Robotic drawing part 2

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I had a very frustrating time trying to get the 3D printer to start my print. First, I struggled to find Pronterface, and once I finally got it running, my original print was too elaborate to work. So, I decided to try the butterfly design instead, which turned out nicely.  different parts of the butterfly needed different settings, so I had to adjust that in Grasshoper.  As I was figuring out how to work with the printer and Pronterface, I kept sending the pen too far and knocking it off the bed lol. I ran into a scaling issue, I don't know the reason, however. The design was the right size, but when I imported it into Pronterface, the file would shrink  THENNN! Rhino and Grasshopper were sending the stream to the wrong files. Every time I hit "stream destination" and tried to resave, nothing changed. After an hour of troubleshooting, I had to take a break! Once I figured things out and resized the file, I started printing. But after an hour of printing, I realized the d...