A Letterpress Arm Assembly in Inventor!

Last night, Amy and I took dinner and our electronic devices over to my brother's house. Rob, my brother, owns a letterpress studio which has a massive array of mechanical pieces (great for modeling). So, after dinner I went out to the studio and modeled the crank arm on a press.

This was an interesting exercise for me. The project presented a couple of challenges that I had not dealt with previously, primarily that the arm assembly tapered on all three axes, in addition to having a job in it. This was also my first assembly (meaning that I created multiple components and then incorporated them together into a single model). It took a bit to find the options to constrain the measurements and figure out how they work for assemblies, but in the end it came out pretty nicely!

Next step for this is to add a screw to the end of the handle and some holes at the top of the crank to hold it on a rod that projects from the press.

A Little AutoCAD From Screencasting Today

Today I worked on homework, and while I'm sure it would both thrill and excite, I'm only including half of it (the electrical drafting half of it). That's right, you'll need to get your structural steel fix elsewhere. Here's a bit of what I did today.

Inventor Pieces From Some Screencasting

Screencasting got a little split up today, but it has been interesting so far! I did some more work in Autodesk Inventor and did some renderings. Enjoy!

Inventor Rendering Numero Deux

Here's a little bit I put together in Autodesk Inventor today. Apparently, this is what a flag pole holder would look like if it were made of opal. The rest are some interesting ice cube concepts.

Orbital Camera Rig, Part 2

Yesterday was manufacturing day for the camera rig. All the pieces were measured, cut with the chop saw, then assembled.

The sawdust from cutting the PVC was pretty intense.

Finally, I put it together for a dry fitting.

So, I brought it home and put it up...

And it was too big! It was then I realized that I had measured for 1/2" PVC, but had purchased 3/4" for added stability. So tomorrow, I'll be doing a little trimming up of the top and bottom, as well as a little re-cutting for the top to make it easier to mount my tablet for live streaming. Here are some more pictures f how badly off I was.

At least the fire's been nice.

Orbital Camera Rig, Part 1

I have really enjoyed screencasting lately. I find that it is fantastic motivation to do my homework. However, there is a problem: not all of my homework can be done on my computer. Specifically, I am taking a structural steel class and an architectural drafting class which both require hand sketches. Last week, I played around with that a little bit by propping my laptop on an angle and using it's webcam which was okay, but it didn't give all that good of coverage and my drawings were a little difficult to see. So yesterday I decided to model a camera rig. First, I  measured my coffee table (as that's probably where the rig is going to be spending most of its working time).

Then, I downloaded a pile of PVC components from Google's 3D Warehouse and built the model. I used the model to calculate parts and quantities, then made a trip to Home Depot to acquire the parts. To mount the camera, I am using a tutorial I found on Instructables. Here's the model.

Early Morning Screencasting Recap

Today I decided to switch it up a bit and work on some photogrammetric modeling rather than the usual Google SketchUp bit. I decided to model something simple (an old travel chest) and something a little more complex (my guitar). I am really excited by the potential of photogrammetric modeling, especially when it comes to using it to model organic props (see my previous post about modeling my sister's tree for a tree house). The ability to generate a model and then be able to work around it in other software (like Revit) really opens up a lot of possibilities.

Anyhow. Here are this morning's workings. The last one is a render I did using a V-Ray demo inside of Google SketchUp.