To start this section, we first made our dream castle/fortress in order to get familiar with Tinkercad. So for me, I decided to make a fortress similar to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and make it crystal-esque.
We then looked at using MeshMixer for more organic shapes, and we made an alien-type resident for our castle. I just kind of had fun with some primitives and came up with this:
a creature I fear might haunt my dreams for a time…
Next, we looked at 3D scanning methods using an iPad as well as an Xbox Kinect (and software Skanect). I chose to try and fix my bust scan from the Skanect software since I felt it had a bit more definition. This meant I needed to stitch a hole in my head since the Kinect was not able to capture that part of me. This was the end result:
For our Assignment, we needed to come up with and sketch 4 ideas:
1 – a non-traditional set of utensils – I chose a set of fork and knife that had hidden corn-holders in the handles. I also started to make a 3D model of these, but Tinkercad was just not the tool for the curves, and MeshMixer was a bit too organic for the kind of shapes I needed:
2- For my cultural piece, I figured I’d try to implement a kind of 3D version of Diego Rivera’s The Creation which was used in the translation of the Popol Vuh, but used to represent me by changing it to reflect things that make my who I am, like server racks, networking equipment, etc:
3 – Then for the 3D version of a famous work of art, I thought to do a 3D representation of M.C Escher’s Relativity: But I realized the complexity of such a design might be a bit too ambitions for this project:
Finally, the 4th prompt was to design something I need. I had just the thing. One of my hobbies is refurbishing old IBM Model M mechanical keyboards, as shown below:
This includes using a Teensy controller to convert the keyboard to use USB as it’s connection so it can be used on modern computers. I needed a way to mount the USB-C plug into the spot where the cord grommet used to pass through the keyboard. I had been trying to use an existing stl file I found online, but the shape was not right, and I always ended up having to do a lot of shaping with xacto knives, dremel tools, etc. So I wanted to start from scratch and model my own part by taking detailed measurements with my set of calipers. I did so, and this was the result:
I printed it on the Flash Forge printers, and I got this:
The measurements on the mounting holes were a little bit off, but nothing I wasn’t able to fix with a few strokes of a drill with a 9/64″ bit. The result:
A much better fitting plug mount. Overall I was happy with this, I now have a model I can print en-mass for the other keyboards I do. I do need to adjust the location of the mounting hole since it seems I nudged them during the design, but that is easy to fix since I now have the original model.