Other than the annoying thing that I couldn’t download it using Firefox or Linux, and that you need to update using Windows and HTC Sync… its awesome.  Even though it’s a Taiwan ChungHwa ROM, there is an English option luckily

In addition to the Sense UI and its wonderful feature set, another interesting but hidden away feature is “Mobile Internet Sharing”, aka tethering!  Azilink is now redundant with this new firmware, and honestly I was getting annoyed with Azilink’s performance and constant dropping out.  On Ubuntu at least, it was ‘plug-and-play’ without any other tricks.  Awesome.

Now I’m not so jealous about all the HTC Hero’s my friends and relatives have…

Photos (pretty boring) after the break.

Neat little package

The toys just keep coming in!  Another one of those wallet killing impulsive orders whilst I was sick in bed last week just arrived today, a USB-CAN bus converter module by EasySync that promises a great interface and should work in Linux!  This will give a little bump start to my Mazda CAN Bus / mChumby projects.

Note : EasySync UK’s online form doesn’t allow international shipping but a short E-mail or two managed that.  There is a US subsidiary with US and international shipping, but the international shipping rates on the US site is plain ridiculous [$68USD to ship a $88 device to Australia].

Note 2 : I hear the interface is mimicking the Lawicel CAN-USB interface…only hearsay…

Plugged it in – didn’t work.  Doh!  Took a peek at the manual and website, nothing on Linux other than “Linux drivers provided”… So much for the marketing material, guess I have to try make it work myself.  (Yes I got it working, read on for the quick run-down post aimed at helping others)

Sneak peek inside the box

Now with the photos out of the way, a little bit of detective work is ahead of us… why doesn’t this thing work… I paid so much money for it to replace the qprotos adapter!

A little bit of lsusb (or cat /proc/bus/usb/devices if you’ve got usbdevfs) sleuthing later…

Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0403:fac6 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd
Device Descriptor:
 bLength                18
 bDescriptorType         1
 bcdUSB               2.00
 bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
 bDeviceSubClass         0
 bDeviceProtocol         0
 bMaxPacketSize0         8
 idVendor           0x0403 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd
 idProduct          0xfac6
 bcdDevice            6.00
 iManufacturer           1 EasySync
 iProduct                2 USB2-F-7001 CAN-Plus Adapter
 iSerial                 3 ESNFWLPL
 bNumConfigurations      1
 Configuration Descriptor:
 bLength                 9
 bDescriptorType         2
 wTotalLength           32
 bNumInterfaces          1
 bConfigurationValue     1
 iConfiguration          0
 bmAttributes         0x80
 (Bus Powered)
 MaxPower              150mA
 Interface Descriptor:
 bLength                 9
 bDescriptorType         4
 bInterfaceNumber        0
 bAlternateSetting       0
 bNumEndpoints           2
 bInterfaceClass       255 Vendor Specific Class
 bInterfaceSubClass    255 Vendor Specific Subclass
 bInterfaceProtocol    255 Vendor Specific Protocol
 iInterface              2 USB2-F-7001 CAN-Plus Adapter
 Endpoint Descriptor:
 bLength                 7
 bDescriptorType         5
 bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
 bmAttributes            2
 Transfer Type            Bulk
 Synch Type               None
 Usage Type               Data
 wMaxPacketSize     0x0040  1x 64 bytes
 bInterval               0
 Endpoint Descriptor:
 bLength                 7
 bDescriptorType         5
 bEndpointAddress     0x02  EP 2 OUT
 bmAttributes            2
 Transfer Type            Bulk
 Synch Type               None
 Usage Type               Data
 wMaxPacketSize     0x0040  1x 64 bytes
 bInterval               0
Device Status:     0x0000
 (Bus Powered)

Yup definitely a FTDI device, even with the FTDI vendor ID (Did I mention I love FTDI?).  Looks like EasySync decided they wanted their own unique product ID, unfortunately that means the vanilla ftdi_sio drive won’t pick it up without a little bit of coercing.

The little bit of coercing goes like…

modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0×0403 product=0xfac6

And bingo…

[ 6372.229046] usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 6372.437247] usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 6372.439834] ftdi_sio 2-2:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[ 6372.439872] usb 2-2: Detected FT232RL
[ 6372.439934] usb 2-2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

Using putty to connect to ttyUSB0 at 115200, and typing “H” followed by “Enter” gives us

=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~= PuTTY log 2009.06.30 21:23:18 =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=
H
List of Supported Commands
O - Open CAN Channel
C - Close CAN Channel
t - Transmit Standard Frame
T - Transmit Extended Frame
F - Read Status Flag
V - USB2-F-7001 Version
N - Serial Number of USB2-F-7001
Z - TimeStamp Option On/Off
S - Set CAN Bit Rate
s - Set BRGCON Registers
m - Set Acceptance Mask
M - Set Acceptance Filter
B - Enter Bootload Mode
L - Set Listen Mode
E - Clear Buffers and Echo Char
R - Reset USB2-F-7001
H, ? or h - Help on USB2-F-7001 Commands

Only problem is that its Mac style line endings.  Even the append CR to LF option in putty is useless because the stream seems to be CR without LF…  Doesn’t hurt too much except displaying it is a bit annoying.

The EasySync USB-CAN adapter’s pinout is pretty much standard DB9 for CAN Bus and all I had to do was connect my existing J1962 (aka OBD-II aka DLC-2) cable on and onto the car I went.

A couple of short “S6″ (500kbps) “L” (Open connection for listen mode) commands later, I had CAN data being spat back at me

t04680601FF0000000000
t04680601FF0000000000
t04680601FF0000000000
t04680601FF0000000000
t04680601FF0000000000
t20F8FFFF27104000FF01
t2118FFFF000040000001
t4B082710271027102710
t19080000000000000000

All is good…except I just deleted my Chumby Development Virtual Machine a few hours ago…ooops…another day before I use this neat little adapter for mChumby.

Go on, use your QR Reader on this

Yes, that is “Colour” not “Color” for all your Americans out there!

QR Code is one of the more widespread/popular 2D barcodes out there.  Sure there are others that are used commercially in airline/train ticketing, but none wide as much ‘reader’ support in the form of mobile phones and software.  Almost all phones in Japan are able to read QR Code, add to that Nokias and various WinMo apps.  Not to mention the wonderful ZXing open-source app that’ll work on any mobile that supports Java or Android.

One of the beautiful things about QR Code is that it can tolerate errors in the code.  Depending on the encoding used, up to 30% of data can be lost and the full content can still be retrieved.

I caught onto QR Code a few years back but the ZXing Android app reminded me of this wonderful piece of technology.  A little curious, I thought I’ll add a bit of colour to the otherwise dull and boring black/white QR Code.  Others have noted that if you have enough contrast between foreground and background, most readers will still recognise the code – but lets make every block a different colour!  Yup, it still works!  Its a lot more prettier and fancier, but a thing to note is that you should still use colours that are a high contrast to the background.  I guess I could have used a pale yellow instead of a white background to add more…but that’ll be just over doing it.

Have a play with QR Code.  There are numerous generators online if you do a search, here is the ZXing Generator link.

(Anyone want to write an extension to a generator to make random colour QR codes?)

Download the Citrix Linux client (v11) from :-
http://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/index.asp
URL mileage may vary, go back to the home page if its not right.

Unpack the tarball and install… e.g.

tar -xvzf linuxx86-11.0.140395.tar.gz
sudo ./setupwfc

Might be missing a ‘cd’ step here obviously…
If run using sudo, default installs to /usr/lib/ICAClient

Confirm it doesn’t run because of libmotif

/usr/lib/ICAClient/wfcmgr
/usr/lib/ICAClient/wfcmgr: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Download a 32bit (i386) Open Motif package from :-
http://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/o/openmotif/

Rip out libXm from it…

$ dpkg -x libmotif3_2.2.3-4_i386.deb ./tmp
$ cd ./tmp
~/tmp$ cd usr/lib
~/tmp/usr/lib$ ls
libMrm.so.3      libUil.so.3      libXm.so.3      X11
libMrm.so.3.0.2  libUil.so.3.0.2  libXm.so.3.0.2
~/tmp/usr/lib$ sudo cp libXm.so.3 /usr/lib32/
~/tmp/usr/lib$ cd /usr/lib32
/usr/lib32$ sudo ln -s libXm.so.3 libXm.so.4

Then this stupid error…
You have not chosen to trust “Equifax Secure Global eBusiness CA-1″, the issuer of the servers security certificate (SSL error 61).

Download the root 1 (Base64) Cert from :-
http://www.geotrust.com/resources/root-certificates/index.html
Change the extension to .crt
Copy it to Citrix Installation Path/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts

$ mv Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.cer Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.crt
$ sudo cp Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.crt /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/

Set firefox to open the ICA with /usr/lib/ICAClient/wfica

Voila…

Need to tidy this post up in the future

How to install Adobe Flash Plugin 64 Bit for Ubuntu 9.04

A lot of the tutorials/guides online will tell you to use nspluginwrapper or similar.  Adobe has released an ‘alpha’ version of their 64 bit player which is pretty stable so far…

Download it from :-http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Unpack the archive and copy the only file to the Firefox plugins folder in ‘/usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins‘ :-

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins

How to install Skype 64 bit for Ubuntu 9.04

You would think you could just go to www.skype.com and ask for a download and it’ll be like the Adobe site detecting that you have a 64 bit system right?  Wrong (at time of writing).  Annoyingly that’ll just let you download an i386 package!

You could manually remedy this by downloading the AMD64 .deb package from :-
http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64

Everything else?

So far the respositories have been kind to me… but i’ll update if I run into any other troubles

Voila happy 64 bit Ubuntu’ing.

Test of revised layout

A few interesting tidbits were learned from the experiments :-

1. HaXe + Geany are great for developing flash widgets for the Chumby
2. Gnash doesn’t render the same as Linux Adobe Flash
3. Chumby renders the same as Adobe Flash
4. Text vertical alignment in flash is crap

A bit of background and a demo video of the widget on the Chumby after the break.

The last post describes my resurrection of a two year old project.  Here’s a super short summary with many pictures, photos and videos!

The original layout

Original concept layout...

Original layout prototyped

Test of original layout

I thought the speed gauge didn’t look too bad but I got convinced by a friend to redesign the layout.  Plus I really didn’t know why I needed a song name on the display or the blinker indicators…

The revised layout

Gah Gnash vs Adobe Flash

I’ve been using Geany to write the HaXe code for this and it is pretty easy to link it in with Gnash to view the resultant Flash when compiling/executing.  So all it all it seemed like a good package for flash development until I realised Gnash doesn’t render quite the same as Adobe… (“Gah” is my sign of exasperation that Gnash renders the flash differently…).

That’s not the important bit…the important bit is that it doesn’t render like the Chumby either!!!  ARGH.  (P.S. The fault is with Gnash rendering textfields vertically centered whereas flash render’s them top aligned, easy enough to fix…)

Gnash vs Flash player in Ubuntu

Chumby vs Gnash vs Linux Flash

Chumby gesture interface test video

Works pretty well I have to say   What do you think?

I even ended up buying 2 Chumbies for the purpose of hacking one and developing the same speedo (The chumby is such a great alarm clock I couldn’t live without one…).

There has been quite a bit of interest in the comments for source code/information etc etc.  So now I’m officially starting the mChumby project!  This first post is basically a brainstorming session write-up or a mini requirements specification on myself.  Feel free to comment on any ideas/improvements you think I can make.

(This post seems too wordy without a photo but I’m just too lazy)

The concept

A Chumby will connect via CAN Bus to the Mazda to offer an alternative ‘GUI’ to the car.  Information such as fuel consumption that has been removed from the Australian Mazda’s will be displayed.

Since a chumby doesn’t have native CAN Bus connections, a custom daughter board with dual CAN controllers and transceivers will be built to replace the native Chumby power board.

The hardware

In addition to the Chumby mainboard, there will be a custom daughter board to be made to handle the car interface.  The Chumby has multiple SPI interfaces brought out through the ‘Chumbilical’, as well as on-board voltage regulators that will take up to 15V.  So a quick brainstorm on the daughter-board components leads me to :-

CAN Controller : MCP2515 – Has SPI interface, great for Chumby.
CAN Transceiver : TJA1041 or whatever it is I have in my box of electronics – Because I have them already
USB Connectors + Associated electronics…
Automotive Voltage Suppressor : Vishay had a few good ones

Luxuries like accelerometers are too much of a pain to hand solder

The software

I’m going to try use completely open source software in the development.  This will be discounting the Flash Lite 3 player that ships with the Chumby.  I debated much about developing a QT app or a flash widget, what I decided was undecided and I switched back and forth.  In the end, I’m sticking with Flash (for now).

There are two main pieces of software required, the GUI and the CAN Bus drivers.

The GUI as decided before will be Flash targetting the Flash Lite 3 on the Chumby.  For this I decided to use HaXe, which will happily compile to Flash 8 bytecode.  It is not as popular in open source flash developement as say ActionScript 2 with mtasc but I figured I’ll use the newer language.  Unfortunately there is a severe lack of HaXe examples on the net and when you find them, you’ll find that its based on Flash 9 API… GAH.  However a little bit of experimentation and googling around made me see how easy it is to actually use HaXe.  More on this later.

The driver’s for the MCP2515′s I haven’t really looked at yet but I hope that it’ll be a simple matter of adapting MCP2515 code from elsewhere and merging it with hopefully some SPI driver’s in the Chumby kernel source (did I mention how great the Chumby is? Source code is made available!).

There is a bit of other software that’ll be used to create this project.  I’m planning on learning how to use KiCAD to generate the PCB where as I’ve only previously used Eagle on my hobby projects.  While I’m sure Eagle will get the job done, I really want to give a try in learning how to use the open source KiCAD.  Let me know if you have any hints.

Geany will be my lightweight editor/IDE of choice, its so simple to use and amazing.  (I like Notepad++ in Windows but I haven’t booted Windows at home for a while…)

The HMI

I like easy to use and simple user interfaces.  This is especially true when I’m driving, I definitely do not want this thing distracting me.  My initial idea was to organise it such that all the ‘buttons’ are on the corners of the screen but on second thought even trying to touch that while driving may be a bit difficult.

Current idea is to use some simple swipe gestures to control the screen.  The idea is to have minimal interaction with my mChumby as possible while driving.  I intend to have 2 screens, one to display a large speedo and the main displays and a second screen to display a smaller speed with alot of additional potentially useless information (I haven’t figured out what yet).  I will also need brightness control to avoid getting a super bright screen at night.  So simply, swipe left-right will allow me to change screens and wipe up-down will allow me to adjust backlight brightness.

Below is just an embarassing sample of the HaXe code I was experimenting with…

Mchumby.hx

//MChumby GUI - HaXe code targetting Flash 8

class Mchumby{
  //Gesture Variables
  static var fGestureStartX:Float;
  static var fGestureStartY:Float;
  static var fGestureEndX:Float;
  static var fGestureEndY:Float;
  static var fGestureDeltaX:Float;
  static var fGestureDeltaY:Float;

  //MovieClips (Screens)
  static var mcMain : flash.MovieClip;

  static var mcD100 : flash.MovieClip;
  static var mcD101 : flash.MovieClip;
  //MovieClips (Buttons/Other Elements)

  //Text Fields
  static var tfText : flash.TextField;

  static var tfSpeedo : flash.TextField;
  static var tfAccelX : flash.TextField;
  static var tfAccelY : flash.TextField;
  static var tfAccelZ : flash.TextField;  

  //Text Format/Styles
  static var ts = new flash.TextFormat();
  static var tsCenter = new flash.TextFormat();

  public function new(){
    //Constructor - Most items are moved to main();
    fGestureStartX=0;
    fGestureStartY=0;
  }

  static function main(){
    //Setup main MovieClip
    mcMain = flash.Lib.current;

    //Set up some font styles
    ts.font = "Arial";
    ts.size = 24;
    ts.color = 0x00FFFF;

    tsCenter.font = "Arial";
    tsCenter.size = 24;
    tsCenter.color = 0xFF0000;
    tsCenter.align = 'center';

    //Set up screens the new way
    //var m100 = new M100(mcMain);
    //var m101 = new M101(mcMain);

    //Set up screens
    mcD100 = mcMain.createEmptyMovieClip("D100", mcMain.getNextHighestDepth());
    mcD101 = mcMain.createEmptyMovieClip("D101", mcMain.getNextHighestDepth());

    //Set up text fields
    tfText = mcMain.createTextField("tfText", mcMain.getNextHighestDepth(), 20, 20, 280, 100);
    tfText.setNewTextFormat(tsCenter);

    //Set up text fields (D100)
    tfSpeedo = mcD100.createTextField("speedotext", mcD100.getNextHighestDepth(), 20,50,280,100);
    tfSpeedo.setNewTextFormat(ts);
    tfAccelX = mcD100.createTextField("accelx", mcD100.getNextHighestDepth(), 20,80,280,100);
    tfAccelX.setNewTextFormat(ts);
    tfAccelY = mcD100.createTextField("accely", mcD100.getNextHighestDepth(), 20,110,280,100);
    tfAccelY.setNewTextFormat(ts);
    tfAccelZ = mcD100.createTextField("accelz", mcD100.getNextHighestDepth(), 20,140,280,100);
    tfAccelZ.setNewTextFormat(ts);

    //Set up text fields (D101)

    //Initialise text
    tfText.text = 'Hello World!';

    tfSpeedo.text = 'Accelerometer Values...';

    //Set up event handlers
    mcMain.onMouseDown = startGesture;
    mcMain.onMouseUp = endGesture;
    mcMain.onEnterFrame = update;
  }

  static function update(){
    tfAccelX.text = Std.string(ChumbyNative.getAccelerometer(5));
    tfAccelY.text = Std.string(ChumbyNative.getAccelerometer(6));
    tfAccelZ.text = Std.string(ChumbyNative.getAccelerometer(7));
  }
  static function startGesture () {
    fGestureStartX = flash.Lib.current._xmouse;
    fGestureStartY = flash.Lib.current._ymouse;
  }

  static function endGesture () {
    fGestureEndX = flash.Lib.current._xmouse;
    fGestureEndY = flash.Lib.current._ymouse;
    fGestureDeltaX = Math.round(fGestureEndX - fGestureStartX);
    fGestureDeltaY = Math.round(fGestureEndY - fGestureStartY);

		//Rather than else-if, the following if's are deliberately done to allow compound gestures
		//e.g. Up & Left, Down & Right etc.
    if (!Math.isNaN(fGestureDeltaY) && (fGestureDeltaY > 100)) {
      gestureDown();
    }

    if (!Math.isNaN(fGestureDeltaY) && (fGestureDeltaY < -100)) {
      gestureUp();
    } 

    if (!Math.isNaN(fGestureDeltaX) && (fGestureDeltaX < -200)) {
      gestureLeft();
    }

    if (!Math.isNaN(fGestureDeltaX) && (fGestureDeltaX > 200)) {
      gestureRight();
    }
  }
  static function gestureRight () {
    tfText.text = "To the right!";
    mcD100._alpha = 0;
    //tfText.setTextFormat(ts);
  }
  static function gestureLeft () {
    tfText.text = "To the left!";
    mcD100._alpha = 100;
  }
  static function gestureUp () {
    tfText.text = "Bright!";
    ChumbyNative.setLCDMute(0);
  }
  static function gestureDown () {
    tfText.text = "Dim!";
    ChumbyNative.setLCDMute(1);
  }
}

ChumbyNative.hx

class ChumbyNative{
  public static function getLCDMute():Int{
    return flash.Lib._global.ASnative(5,19);
  }
  public static function setLCDMute(x:Int):Void{
    flash.Lib._global.ASnative(5,20)(x);
  }
  public static function getAccelerometer(x:Int):Float{
    return flash.Lib._global.ASnative(5,60)(x);
  }
}

Mchumby.hxml

-swf mchumby.swf
-main Mchumby
-swf-header 320:240:12:000033
-swf-version 8

I hope this post is useful for other people, but its really a lazy way of me bookmarking everything in-case I have to do it again.

Before anyone I know asks “Why didn’t you use (Insert Linux Variant Here)?”, its because linux has poor language input capabilities for any language other than English.  Windows Vista has in-built character recognition for a plethora of languages and most tablets are sold with software written for Windows.

Anyway that’s probably the last pro-Microsoft paragraph you’ll get out of me…So what did I download for dad?

OpenOffice

In my opinion one of the best suites of open-source software out there, OpenOffice will basically do anything Microsoft Office will do but for free.  From doing your expenses to writing up reports and articles, OpenOffice will do it for you.

Office 2007 onwards annoyed the hell out of me with the non-intuitive ribbons interface.  OpenOffice retains the old but tried menu system so I can teach/help my dad over the phone quite easily.

Comodo Internet Security

After the collapse of Kerio Personal Firewall I switched to Comodo Firewall (aka Comodo Internet Security).  It’s easy to set up and offered free without any feature limitations by Comodo.  The Defense+ element of the software might be annoying for some users though…

Remember, the standard Windows Firewall is next to useless!

AVG Anti-Virus

Any windows machine for a new computer user MUST be set-up with decent anti-virus software.  I’ve used AVG for probably around 10 years now and it has worked great.  It may not rate the highest in detection tests and benchmarks but its free, easy to use and updates regularly.

VLC Media Player

I’m not a fan of Windows Media Player, I either use Media Player Classic or VLC.  For my dad I opted to install VLC to keep the install clean of odd-ball codecs from strange sources.

VLC will play almost all video formats except for a few proprietary ones (e.g. RealMedia).

Foxit PDF Reader

Inevitably when surfing the web one would come across articles or papers in the ubiquitous ‘PDF’ format.  Adobe’s free reader has in my opinion become bloated and slow, while Foxit’s alternative is lightweight and fast.

A new version 3 has just been released and I have some issues with this new version (program is slow to close), however you can still download and install the old 2.4 versions if you like.

Firefox

Might be going slightly out of order when I mentioned surfing the web.  I will not allow my dad, a new computer user to browse the web using Internet Explorer – it’ll just be a disaster waiting to happen.

Firefox is standards compliant and is extremely powerful when combined with useful add-ons such as Adblock Plus, NoScript, and FireGestures (just to name a few I installed for him).  Search for these via Firefox->Tools->Add-ons.

Picasa

I wasn’t a great fan of Picasa but I recently revisited it after needing to look at geodata (GPS Co-ordinates) embedded within exif data and was I surprised.  The new version 3 incorporates a very quick image viewer to replace Window’s annoying image previewer that mangles your photos if you rotate them for viewing!  The interface is swift and useable, great for my mom to view her happy snaps.

Skype

With a family scattered over the four corners of the Earth (I think there’s an average distance of 6000km between each of the 4 siblings…), dad will definitely need an internet chat/phone program.  Skype fits the bill perfectly being free and used by all my family with one of the best quality video and audio I’ve seen.

There’s even paid options to ring landlines and mobiles (overseas of local) from the comfort of the home PC using the ‘Skype-Out’ service.

That’s it folks!

That is it for the bare essentials!  There may be other software utilities such as 7-Zip other’s may consider essential, but this is where I’ve drawn my line for the usage needs of my dad.

Do you think I’ve missed out on anything (for use for the average new computer user)?

So I set out to design something in the shortest amount of time and yet would still give me a good ‘feel’ of what 3D printing is capable of today.  The time constraint was probably also due to the fact I read about the offer at midnight and wanted to send it to print before I sleep   Result? Concept, Design, Upload, Ordered all within 2 hours!

Concept

Design

Iris Design - Alibre Xpress Assembly

Ordering

Delivery / Final Product

Iris Diaphragm - Open

This is the reversed side…

Iris Diagram - Open (Reverse Side)

Iris almost closed... STARGATE!!!

Iris Other Side Almost Closed...forgot to add this picture the first time around...just added it back 1st Dec 2008

What did I learn?

1. The black detail material is actually quite springy and not very rigid. I expected this (in fact hoped for it) for the really thin blades, but the inner ring was packed as an ellipsoid in the packaging Which made trying to bend it back into shape and fitting it into the outer ring a bit annoying.
2. I need to add more clearance to parts I intend to have mechanically move The pins fit and slide into the slots perfectly… but the pivot pins and the inner/outer ring don’t really rotate … need to do some sanding I think.
3. The black detail print requires support material and alot of that stays with the model if not cleaned off…
4. You can actually notice the ‘print lines’ that mark the pieces.
5. I couldn’t fully close it…and I shouldn’t force it closed with such a flimsy plastic…aka I broke a pin off a blade by forcing it too hard… lucky I bought a spare set of blades

What’s next?

Engineers and jewelry don’t mix right?… Who knows with 3D printing this easy and companies that offer 3D jewelry wax printing… hmmmmm

Engineering Jewelry?

This is a little ring I concocted up against very quickly using Alibre Design Xpress…

Heart Rings painted by Peter Paul (Shapeways)

Edit : I figured out the problem with the tesselation of the iris rings, will be fixing and improving the design again for a round 2!

Edit 2 : I just ran into the photo of someone painting the ‘heart ring’   They look so cute… mmm almost like candy…mmm hungry…