My Components:
I knew almost all of my components due to past experiences i've had with circuits. The only one I was not familiar with was the 556 Chip. I searched it in my browser, and clicked on the Wikipedia page. I learned that it is an Integrated Circuit Chip that causes delays between the pulses of energy in a circuit, causing there to be a time delay in the circuit. |
Testing and Soldering:
After I gathered and identified all my parts, I proceeded to test the resistance of the three Potentiometers. I needed to find out which direction, if rotated, increased the resistance, and which way decreased the resistance. After I discovered that turning the stem of the potentiometers counterclockwise increased the amount of resistance, I progressed to soldering. Although this was one of my first times ever soldering, the adhesions between my wires and my potentiometers turned out great: there was a small amount of exposed wire and unsoldered metal. |
Setting up the Breadboard:
The first step in setting up my breadboard was to put the 556 Timer Chip into my breadboard. I connected my positive and negative sides of my breadboard together thus connecting both sides of the breadboard. I then added the R1 (potentiometer) and R2 resistors to my circuit. After placing connector wires into my breadboard, I was ready to move onto the next stage of putting in my capacitors. |
At this point, I started to add my capacitors. I put the .01 and .1 capacitors in first and then proceeded to add my polarized capacitor last. Also, I added two more jumper wires. After placing all of these components in their respective spots on the breadboard, I realized a lot of metal was showing which could lead to a short circuit when I tried to turn it on. So I decided to add some Shrink to the wires of my capacitors and to the R2 resistor (picture to the right).
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Schematic - 1M Potentiometer
(Side view and Top view) |
Schematic - 5K Potentiometer
(Orthographic view and Top view) |
To the right is one of my first prints using the single nozzle printer. As you can see, my design is not only cut off at the top, but also covered completely in plastic supports. I tried for the next day to get as much off as I could, but in the end I gave up and decided to use the dual extrusion printer with the help of Ms. Dixon for the remainder of my prints.
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This is my first dual extrusion print, which was going perfectly until the printer decided to stop. I started the printer once again with the same design as before. Unfortunately, this was on Friday, so I was unable to see the end result the next day. Nevertheless, over that weekend I was on a bunch of college visits and I decided to test the effects of hot vs. cold water when dissolving the supports. The hot water dissolved the supports much faster than the supports in cold water (about 3x faster) . Interesting!
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Came back from the weekend to see this beauty sitting in the finished print box. I put it straight into water and let it begin dissolving. I realized that it wasn't fully submerged so I got a wood block from the scrap pile and used it to weigh down the knob. I left this submerged overnight in the lab.
The picture to the right is the finished product of one of my 1M knobs. After printing this knob, the next two were easier to print due to experience and because 5K knob didn't require the dual extrusion printer.
Even though the print looks great, I still noticed a couple flaws in the print. For instance the cone on the bottom isn't even attached to the ball/cube in the center by about a 1 mm. I'm actually shocked that this happened because I would expect the printer to mess up when it got to that point.
Looking back, the same problem must have occured in my first dual extrusion print causing it to stop short. |
First, I designed Captain America's shield using the circle and star tool in Illustrator thus avoiding having to trace it from a .jpg image (and because I personally like vectors more than bitmaps). After Cap's shield, I downloaded three other logo images: the Flash, Batman, and the Hulk behind a torn shirt. After I traced the images and got rid of any double/excess vectors, I designed the holes for the speaker. For this process I took the dimensions of the speaker and created a circle. Then I did a series of other things: Selecting the texture "dots" within swatch libraries, I used the live paint bucket to fill the circle in with dots that were evenly spaced and sized. Then I rasterized the circle, traced, expanded, and used the fisheye warp to give it a cool bubble type look.
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img_28172.mov | |
File Size: | 7903 kb |
File Type: | mov |
img_2819_v2.mov | |
File Size: | 9508 kb |
File Type: | mov |