Quad-Hyperboloid - Pink Monofilament <-- That's a mouthful

I ordered the ‘stool’ in 4 materials, corrogated cardboard, 3mm Bamboo, 3mm Black Acrylic and 6mm Clear Acrylic.  The 6mm Clear acrylic is what you see here.  The top of the stool is supported by 4 ‘pillars’ with an additional 4 support beams for the 3mm materials.  The idea is to use monofilament wire to create multiple hyperboloid surfaces from top to bottom to create a ‘cool’ look.  Of course it helps that the monofilament I used is fluorescent and would glow under UV light

Can you count 4 hyperboloid surfaces?

The clear acrylic with pink monofilament example shown is a classic demonstration of the fact I’m slightly hopeless counting.  I had originally planned for 2 criss-crossed hyperboloid surfaces but due to a miscount I realized I screwed up on the first reverse weave.  Deciding to run with the mistake rather than going back to fix it I ended up with 4 hyperboloid surfaces, doesn’t look THAT bad… You can see the concentric ‘rings’ of each hyperboloid surface in the next photo.

Concentric circles look cool

A better selection of how many surfaces and curvature would improve the aesthetics greatly.  Its also rather big, would suit someone with a large bottom I suppose.  Overall not a bad experiment result though.

I’m looking forward to the Bamboo and Black Acrylic versions  Really looking forward to taking a photo under UV light too!

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…

Propeller Hats!

A picture post showing the latest delivery from Shapeways.  Joris just posted guidelines on stainless steel printing so I thought I’ll post some photos to show what tiny detail can be achieved.

Fits quite nicely on the shirt cuff...

Back side of the cuff

Blurry cam of a shirt that obviously needs ironing

The various rings from Shapeways next to a Ponoko test card

The ‘thin wire one’ (can’t think of a name) has never been printed before.  It was first dreamt up in the shower , I’m surprised how well a scribble on the fogged up glass of the shower turned out printed in stainless steel!

Lets have a better look

Stainless steel and bronze rings

Stainless steel and bronze rings

Hey look, there’s my invoice.  $1.32 USD for the ‘thin wire one’ (have to think of a name…or have to remember what I named it  on Shapeways…) – great price eh?

The print quality is very good though it appears (not sure) that some post processing (polishing?) was done.

Nothing much else to say!  Have to move on to the next post…Ciao!

Death to the unbelievers who thought this will collapse!

Read on for the build process…

Design

I wanted something different, unique, or maybe just weird and the first concept that came to me was this :

A little bit of chaos...randomly aligned support struts

It was going to be out of MDF, with the plates painted black and the supports painted red but I figured I probably suck a painting when I got drawn in by the BAMBOO material Ponoko had on offer.

Bamboo is a wicked temptation, almost 3 times more expensive than thicker MDF and limited to 5.5mm thickness I figured I needed a new design.  No need to show that here… lets just skip to see the result shortly.

Summary of design process (with links!) was to use Alibre Xpress to model up all the pieces and lay it as a flat pattern, export the flat pattern to DXF, convert it to SVG using Kabeja, check and apply Ponoko template using Inkscape and voila…

Assembly

The unpacking joy was already covered in a previous post which included a odd-ball of filler design as not to waste the material.  A replacement piece was kindly sent from Ponoko to replace the one damaged in shipping (Thank you Ponoko).  Here are all the pieces laid out on my snooker/table tennis table.

All the laser-cut bamboo pieces from Ponoko nicely laid out

Remember to use protection dear…

If you looked closely there’s a can of ‘Danish Oil’ on the table which will shortly be applied to the wood to give…

A layer of danish oil to protect and stain the wood

Shiny! Much prettier too   Wait for it to dry and flip it over to coat the other side and the process can continue!

Putting it together…

Piecing it together is as simple as slotting all the pieces together as the following photos will show.

Piecing it together bit by bit, 'Slot & Play' style.

Basics of the frame assembled, structural rigidity achieved.

Plate plonks on...

Plate slides in!

Plates lock in...with these little pieces...

Close up of the decorative bits.

Looks kind of 'weird' doesn't it?

No sticky sticky yet

I’ve not applied any PVA glue yet at this stage but just wanted to test out if it can hold some weight.  Even without any glue all the pieces are locked in and stayed all together.

All pieces in place, holds together without glue!

Rear view...

Load testing it with my PC

Load testing again with the PC on the top shelf...

Final touches…

A bit of glue here and there and felt furniture feet on the bottom of the piece as not to scratch the tiles…

PVA Glue is always good...

Furniture feet!

Furniture feet making their appearance again. Camera flash on shows a more true colour of the bamboo.

The moment of truth!

• It did not collapse. (I proved all those unbelievers wrong! Go zoom in on the first photo!)
• It is not too expensive.
• It was kind of fun and a great learning experience.
• It proves that someone (me) who hasn’t made anything with wood since higher school still can create something with these new tools.
• It is not too pretty/arty, but its different and unique and that’s good enough for me.

...it didn't collapse?!?!? (And why is this photo on its side...oops)

Side view - Media PC facing the wrong way...(oops again, so is the floor)

Rear view...

A plug for the great software and great service used to make this…

Ponoko and Alibre plug

(Note this is a generic DXF to SVG conversion and is applicable to many other CAD programs such as AutoCAD, Unigraphics, Catia, SolidWorks etc and is not limited to Alibre Xpress)

First of all what were the problems?

Firstly, as I said, its convoluted and tedious…

Secondly, by looking at the exported SVG files carefully I noticed the flightofideas plugin converted curves to polygons.  This could become a problem on parts that need to fit snuggly together.  I’ve been bitten by poor approximation of curves/splines to polygons before so I’ll hate to make the same mistake again.

Enter Kabeja!

Kabeja is an open source utility/plugin/library for converting DXF’s to various output formats including (mainly) SVG!  You can read more about it on the main webpage but it has allowed me to open DXF’s exported from Alibre in Inkscape

Yup, thats right, its an Inkscape Plugin too.  But i don’t use it that way, I use the command line/GUI version for some bizarre reason.  Yes I’m just weird.

To use it from the command line, simply go to the directory you unzipped your Kabeja to (it should contain a launcher.jar file) and type :-

java -jar launcher.jar -nogui -pipeline svg yourfilein.dxf yourfileout.svg

Or if you prefer it with the GUI, just type :-

java -jar launcher.jar

Of course you need a JRE installed, just download one from Sun if you don’t have one…

BUT THERE IS A CATCH!~~~

If you’re using this for the same reason I am, i.e. to get a decent SVG out for a laser cut, do NOT open the resultant SVG file from Inkscape!  I scratched my head long and hard, googled for hours to find out why Kabeja scaled the SVG to fit to an portrait A4 sheet…with no results.  Why?  Its not Kabeja’s fault really.

IMPORT the resultant SVG file into Inkscape.  You can even import it onto one of Ponoko’s starter kit for a headscape!  Happy Ponoko’ing!

Exporting Alibre Xpress Files to Shapeways STL

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!