WTF Laptop Stand - Cardboard & Acrylic

¹Welcome to Finland / Waratah Train Fleet / Wednesday Thursday Friday / Worse Than Failure etc – Its not what you think.

Why the?

Lots of WTFs!

Ever since visiting Finland last year, it really nagged me that they didn’t have any souvenir T-shirts that read ‘WTF’ (Welcome to Finland).  Add to that the announcement that the Train project at work I’ve been working on has been named ‘Waratah‘, a fleet of trains called Waratah… Waratah Train Fleet, there really can not be a more suitable name.

How the?

A quick doodle on a notebook, quickie sketch in Inkscape and an upload to Ponoko later comes the WTF Laptop Stand.  The design is simple, two parallel sheets of acrylic or cardboard with joined WTF letters and a cross beam/bar to hold it together.  Snap fit so it can be taken apart quickly and put into a bag.

Cardboard WTF Laptop Stand Frame

What the?

Of course with the ‘quick doodle’ and ‘quickie sketch’ comes a price – I screwed up by not remember to actually measure how wide my laptop actually was! Argh.  Luckily its rather trivial to cut up the cardboard version and shorten the joining piece to come up with something usable.

I also forgot to do some fancy logo engraving/cutting in that cross beam too

Cardboard WTF Laptop Stand Frame (Shortened)

Now now, all better.  Now my laptop will actually sit on the stand properly

WTF Laptop Stand - Cardboard Side View

HP ProBook 5310m sitting on a Cardboard WTF Laptop Stand

WTF Laptop Stand - Cardboard Side View Closeup

The last shot above shows how the ‘W’ actually holds the laptop up in place.  It also shows a minor design flaw where I forgot to add a fillet on the inside of the ‘W’.  A fillet is important on materials such as acrylic to avoid create an unnecessary stress point where the piece might break.  Infact I broke a few trying to snap a piece that wasn’t fully cut through … [Ponoko shipped me extra in the package which made up for it].

Where the?

Where are the design files so you can make your own?  Is anyone actually interested?  Let me know through the comments and I can post the ‘fixed’ [Cross bar length and the fillet on the 'W'] design files on Thingiverse if people ask.

Edit : Added to Thingiverse!  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3529

What the? (Again)

Oh just remembered to preempt the ‘what are those holes?’ question, they are an optional feature for threading monofilament (fishing wire) between the pieces to form a weave.  Just thought it might look cool but haven’t gotten around to it.  Recent obsession with monofilament will show in the next post…

Picture time :-

Most of the gear laid out on carpet

Read on for a little bit more…

All crammed into a waterproof case for a test fit

Motor/pump mounts attached by cable ties...

Motor/pump mounts attached by cable ties...

Water Float Test

Water Float Test

Parts List so far

• Asus WL-520GU Wireless Router
• Denkovi USB 8 Channel Relay Board
• AV-Tech AVI202 IP Camera
• Johnson L450 Cartridge Bilge Pump
• 12V 7Ah SLA Battery
• 6V 3.2Ah SLA Battery
• $8AUD Waterproof Case from the discount store

Video time :-

Johnson L450 Bilge Pump Thrust Test

All searches return mathematics related answers.

e.g. “Sydney to Los Angeles” gives

a)Distance 12054 km Flight Time 13 hours 54 minutes
b)Populations
c)Timezones

e.g. “Lee” gives the surname breakdown in USA against ethnicities, ranking its popularity etc.

e.g. “x^3-x^2+5=0″ gives a plot and a solution!

Its cute, but it may not be the most useful…fun nevertheless, have a try!

The idea here is to render the Sydney Rail Network (aka CityRail) using Cytoscape, an open source application typically used by researchers to visualizing bioinformation.  My original idea was actually to visualize something plain like Facebook friend networks but decided on the CityRail niche because it partly relates to my work.

Behold the CityRail Galactic Empire...(Larger image after the break)

Depressing as it may sound, I’ve been itching to do something related to work outside of work.  An original idea was to make papercraft model trains, but I’m too lazy to go around taking photos of trains (I actually hate trains…).

So lets start!

Requirements :-

1. Information must be publicly available.  i.e. I can’t use confidential information and get fired for it…
2. The end result has to be both ‘useful’ and ‘pretty’.   i.e. I can’t fail this one since they’re both subjective…
3. This can’t take too long or I’ll view this as too nerdy an exercise and give up…

Method :-

1. Get the CityRail timetable.
2. Parse it.
3. Generate a fancy visualization based on the data.

Definitions (This is/was written down for my own benefit…I haven’t started yet…) :-

1. A node is a train station on the Sydney metropolitan network (CityRail)
2. A node is categorized by how many trains start/stop/end at this station.
3. A link(edge) between two nodes is created when a train leaves one station/node and stops at another without any intermediate stops.
4. A link(edge) is categorized by the distance between the two nodes, the average time for all trains to transverse the link, and the average speed of trains on this link.

Result :-

The CityRail Interstellar Network...(Can't get over how it looks like a space network map)...Click to Enlarge

Some explanations and a bit of review…

The layout is based on link weighted springs, basically the length of the link is representative of the distance between the stations.

The link colour represents the average speed of trains on that link.  Light blue is fast/good, purple is slow/bad.

The node/station size represents the number of trains that stop at that station.  Central is huge!  Redfern, Town Hall, Sydenham and Strathfield are also obviously key hubs as well.

This took way longer than expected…I made heaps of typos in the parser script and debugging it was hell because the typos all looked ‘legitimate’ (e.g. I typed ‘stations’ instead of ‘nodes’ as the table name…).

But hey the exercise was fruitful.   Its pretty!   It shows some interesting pieces of information (which I won’t spell out)…

Post a comment if you are interested in the cytoscape source file or a SVG vector graphics file of the image

Author’s Note : I’m an avid ‘avoider’ of train travel.

I’ve recently signed up Ponoko’s Prime account and wanted to get something made.  I rather into a rather annoying problem, Alibre Xpress doesn’t have a SVG export.  I needed a way to design something and export it as SVG.

I’ll admit the long post title is a problem too

A possible solution?

After searching the forums for a solution… I stumbled across a very promising method by using Alibre to export to DXF, using OpenOffice draw to import the DXF and then save-as SVG.  Summary result – it didn’t work.  OpenOffice had trouble opening the DXF file and so did the developmental release of Inkscape which includes a native DXF import.

Scratch that.

Google SketchUp?

Then I thought of using Google SketchUp instead of Alibre Xpress because there was the possibility that it’ll work under Ubuntu with Wine rather than me popping back to windows just to use Alibre [Which doesn't work with Wine].  First of all, I couldn’t get it working with Wine because of my laptop graphics card, but apparently it works for other people if you follow the winehq wiki help.  But I wasn’t going to give up… back to windows I go and some more googling research later I stumbled upon some interesting plugins for google sketchup.

SVG Outline Export Plugin

Flight of ideas has created a plug-in for the purpose of exporting SketchUp models into Ponoko friendly SVG files.  Go to his blog or the plug-in page for intructions on how to install and use the plugin, but here are some screenshots to get you interested.

Yup its kinda that easy to use...

Parametric Modeling in Google SketchUp?

Driving Dimensions is a sketchup plugin that attempts to add parametric capabilities onto sketchup.  I’m pretty sure this is a pretty well kept secret because there weren’t all that many people that have downloaded this plug-in (I was the 938th person).  Whilst it is an interesting concept, functionality is rather limited on the current early releases.  Basically you can add linear dimensions and angular dimensions onto lines/objects/whatever and the plugin will manage the these parametric constraints for you.  While it sounds good, in practice its still a nightmare to use because the sheer amount of (dimension) constraints you have to add to fully constrain a sketch.

So many constraints for such a simple piece

Comparison - So much easier in Alibre...

Scratch this idea too…

Alibre has a Google SketchUp export plugin!

Hidden away (I couldn’t find the navigation link at all from the alibre webpage!) and apparently only accessible if you know the exact name of the plugin and by a google search is the Alibre 3D Publisher (linked to save you the pain).  This plugin allows for direct export to Google Sketchup as a version 6 file which can be used with SketchUp 7.

Alibre 3D Publisher Plugin - Is it an STL export in disguise?

Ouch, what are all those triangles if you turn on view hidden geometry in sketchup?  It looks like everything has been triangulated and the svg plugin export picks up all those as individual faces.  One way to ‘fix this’ is to manually select these edges and delete them.  Another way is to automate the process somewhat with a ‘Ruby script’.  But both are too messy for my liking.  The plugin isn’t right for me to use for SVG exporting, but its great for getting a model into sketchup for viewing.

Back to square one…the DXF export…and it works!

While writing this I thought I’ll try the DXF export again and realised that Google SketchUp reads the Alibre Xpress DXFs pretty well.

It goes something like this…

1. Design and Model in Alibre Xpress
2. Export the ‘drawing’ in DXF
3. Import into Google SketchUp.
4. Use the Flight of Ideas SVG export plugin

Voila, SVG for ponoko… its messy but hey it works.  Maybe one day I’ll consider using Inkscape by itself…

Edit : Be careful on the Google SketchUp import because it defaults to ‘feet’ as the units!  If you modeled in ‘mm’ then things go horribly big.  Click ‘Options’ on the import open dialog before you press OK and select the right units!

There were around 6 more on the higher branches...but i was too slow with the camera

This photo is from a few years back in country Hainan…

This post should no more words, its definitive that the tree came before both the chicken and the egg.