My first attempt at printing the heart is pictured below.

Unfortunately, my print was unable to finish, so the superior vasculature is not visible. However, the print did successfully print the smaller collateral vessels of the pulmonary arteries. I also need to experiment with printing the heart without the base and instead printing with supports. The base really takes away from the final product in my opinion. I have printed the heart this past week on the taller Ultimaker Extended so I will see next week if the print turned out. It took about 6.5 hours to print the final product.

I will be collaborating with a group in Peoria this summer to figure out how to make models of the inside of the heart as well. I will hopefully be able to figure out a way to do this using free or open source software. https://twitter.com/GwendolynDerk/status/724360255656751104

While final projects and exams in other classes have kept us busy over the past few weeks, Jack and I were able to get through the first step of the construction of our helmet: gluing stacks of foam together. On Monday, we plan on carving this foam into a helmet-like shape, and carve out the middle so that a head will be able to fit inside of it. The gluing and drying process took almost a full week. There were a few time lags as we had to find the right type of glue to insure the foam would stick and settle together properly. I had to make multiple trips to Menards to resupply on liquid nails, a tough adhesive, typically used in construction projects. Additionally, we have been drawing up some designs as to how we want the outer shell of the helmet to look. We rastered and cut some acrylic for the eyes of the mask, and plan on 3D printing a front grill. We also have been considering 3D printing additional parts such as ears/horns/headphones that we could attach to the sides. In the coming weeks we will be working and experimenting more with acrylic and 3D prints. We also plan on adding arduinos to the grill and front of the mask as well.

Here is a rough sketch of how we want the helmet to look (Jack has a more detailed drawing, my art skills are lacking):

(front view)

 (side view)

This week we learned about the new maker space starting up at Indiana University. Their space reminded me of the CU fab lab. There is an online directory of makerspaces around the world: http://spaces.makerspace.com/makerspace-directory

AND I didn’t see our maker space listed on the map! So I added it. The CU fab lab also needs to be added to the directory. This directory can allow local maker communities to unite into a larger international community. Now you can look up a maker space and 3D print where ever you go!

We learned how we can scan objects (and even ourselves) to create 3D models which we can print. We scanned and printed busts of ourselves. In order to get the scan, the model needed to keep absolutely still as the scanner moved around the person. The model must be kept in the center of the visual field at all times or the scanner would lose track of what it was scanning. Every surface angle needs to be captured. If there are any holes that were not captured in the scanning process, these can be filled in and smoothed out in Meshmixer. Meshmixer is useful for modifying your 3D model and preparing it to be “printer ready.” The object must be on a completely flat surface, otherwise extensive supports will be required to print.

While printing a bust of yourself is not exactly that useful, this technology could be very useful if you wanted to print an object or part that you already had. Instead of redesigning the object from scratch, you could simply scan the object. I may try that this summer with one of the medical school’s skeletons.

This week for class we worked on 3D scanning and printing using two types of scanning technologies. One was on the ipad and used the camera and a piece of add on hardware and software to scan. The other was through propriety scanning hardware and software called geomagic.

The way the 3D scanning software works is it uses laser triangulation. Geomagic uses short-midrange laser triangulation and how it does that is the laser configuration scans across object, the sensor then picks up on reflections from all different angles, and it uses trig to finish up filling in any empty spaces.

I tried both the technologies and found that my hair (and the back of the chair) was where the real issues were when it came to using Geomagic. The ipad was able to scan the human head much better if you had a long sheet of flat hair. Both my partner and I could not get scanned using Geomagic but the IPad worked. When Harina put her hair in a braid, Geomagic worked. It is a much trickier technology to handle than I previously thought. The scans turn out pretty accurate though. I am interested in seeing how accurate scanning of a person versus an object is. I noticed there were two features through Geomagic so I would love to explore how scanning these two subjects affect the accuracy of the final STL file.

What we used to process the scans was Autodesk meshmixer—this is the software that is able to process the STL file that Geomagic saves it as. It was a surprisingly accurate scan. The only thing I wished I could see more nuances with were my eyes. I would say the capture was fairly accurate to how I looked that day. It was able to capture ruffles in my hair and specific details in my clothing so I was pretty impressed with the Ipad scan. Looking at my partner’s scan, I noticed it captured the details of her braid which was pretty impressive. It lost her glasses though. I would love to see how scanning technology improves as software gets more and more accurate.

Ariel also came in to talk about some more practical applications of 3D scanning besides just printing a scan of our bust. She used the scanning technology to get an accurate scan of the grip she uses for Paralympic wheelchair events. I could see scanning being very useful in the medical industry for customization of products. It would be a much faster fix if every hospital had a 3D printer to make custom casts or crutches.

Week 10:

This week for class we worked on Arduinos! Arduinos are “an open-source computer hardware and software company, project and user community that designs and manufactures microcontroller-based kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control the physical world.” In other words, the Arduino boards we used in class are tiny microcontrollers that can be programmed to do things like turn a motor 360 degrees or turn an LED on and off.

This is what all the components look like:

You connect the arduino board to the computer and you use wires to connect Input output pins. There are 5 volt power to the reactor. You can turn the pin on and off.
Arduino is the name of the tiny computer and also the language that we will be writing in

The first thing we programmed was to turn LED on and off. The certain pattern comes from turning signal on and off in a certain manner.

Second piece that we programmed was the Servo motor. Servos are controlled motors. You connect the servo motor with the three long cables. Power is red, ground is brown, and signal is orange. That means the red cable is connected to the 5V, ground is connected to 0V of power and signal is where you write the program and how the servo motor receives the signal. We were able to program the motor to spin in 360 degrees and then again between the degrees of 20-120 degrees. The practical application would be programming a children’s toy to be able to spin in a limited number of degrees so the children’s doll doesn’t look like the exorcist.

Other applications of the simple CPU is a smart cutting board. We will be using the Arduino (or the more advanced Galileo) for our tuning piece.

This week we ventured into the world of 3D scanning and took scans of ourselves from the shoulders up. Honestly, my mind was blown. I had no idea that something so detailed could come from an iPad and a $300 add on. What I thought was even more interesting was that apparently the hardware inside the scanner was just a reworked version of the Xbox Kinect.

The scanning process was simple enough. One person sat in a chair and the other person walked around them to capture from all angles. Then the point cloud (the raw data coming off the sensor) was sent to a server in the cloud to be fully processed, and the final model was then downloaded back to the device. The whole process took less than five minutes. After getting the scanned model, all we have is a starting point. It very likely has some errors in it due to noise from the scan, and it’s our job to clean it up. We used a program called Meshmixer by Autodesk that had lots of great features for cleaning up the scan.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of my scan, but it actually turned out fairly decent. There was just one major flaw on the back of my head where my hairline brushing up against the collar of my jacket messed it up, but it was relatively easy to fix.

Once it was all cleaned up and ready to print, I took a good look at it, and the model was definitely in the “Uncanny Valley”, a term used to describe objects that look almost human like, but are just artificial enough to be creepy. It was honestly a bit disconcerting to look at a full 3D rendering of myself. However, I feel that as this technology improves and the scans get closer to real life, people will stop viewing a 3D model of themselves, and look at it as more of a “3D picture”. There are so many great applications for a cheap, accurate, full body 3D scan. From inserting yourself into your favorite movie or video game, to a doctor being able to remotely diagnose a whole host of ailments, the applications are boundless.