Tuesday 15 February 2011

Uni Assignment - Chair II

Progress has been made with the design. final developed of the chairs aesthetics is under-way as all ergonomic consideration. 

Here is a mock up render of what I'm thinking at the moment. Currently I'm not entirely happy with the legs and how they interact with the seat and lumbar support rest.


and for materials. my original idea was bent ply-wood wrapping over it self as you can see with the seat, i am not thinking about other materials such as Polypropylene as it has more "give" to it and can mould around the body better. There is a chair called the I B Pop which is made out of one sheet of Polyprop' that is folded into shape.


I shall look into ways i can fold my seat as one piece of plastic and use fixtures to connect them all together. 
Still early stages still.

Friday 4 February 2011

Luck

Just my luck went to hand in dissatation preposal and when i got back home i had a letter from parcel force imforming me i had missed them by 10minutes and i'll have to collect my parcel at the post office in 48 hours.

Unhappy face

Thursday 27 January 2011

Uni Assignment - Chair

Yesterday was revelled to my class what material we will be working with for our Advanced Furniture Design Module. It is better than expected for me personally, as it turns out we get to work with 9 Metres of 20mm Diameter 1.2mm thick steal tubing. We had a hunch what it would be as we kept on pestering the working shop technicians to see what material they have ordered in bulk recently.

We also get to add other materials of our choosing to so we are not limited so much but the structure must be visible (the tubing).

I instantly thought of the Ron Arad chair Empty.


I feel I'll be heavily inspired by this chair. What I like the most about it is how the aluminium legs interact with the steam bent wood.

I have given my self the brief of designing a collapsible dining room / breakfast bar chair for the small apartment. which will give me some nice technical challenges as well as flaunting my creative side as well.

Friday 21 January 2011

Additional Board Needed

After a few months of trying to get the firmware to work correctly. i have conceded to the fact that i need another stepper driver to control the extruder motor, the "Extruder Board Hack" just doesn't seem to cut it and is very sporadic.

Well this meant a redesign for the board mount for where to put the circuit boards. As currently it is only designed to hold three.

I have to say the future (now) is pretty damn awesome, as i decided to to this at midday yesterday, had everything 'CADed up' by 1pm and had the finished product attached to the Mendel by 3pm.

Well once the Mendel works i would be able to do most of this at home.



Top right is where the new board will go.


Two Fans to keep the boards all nice and cool.

I also placed the USB and the XLR between the fans, it is more practical and nicer to look at.

Thursday 6 January 2011

Been a while since a good update.

What is happening at the moment:

I've tried updating the firmware with ReplicaOrg, every works fine apart from the extruder stepper motor, probably due to it not having a proper stepper motor driver board.

What the plan is:

Attempt to reinstall the firmware with how the forums say, it is much less user friendly but i shall give it a go. if I succeed I shall attempt to re-write the wiki so other people like me can make more sense of it. as in its current state i feel its not good enough for people who are not used to coding and dealing with andrino.

What has been keeping me from making updates and progress with the Mendel:

Well its my final year at university and that comes first. i have been working on three projects in the autumn semester. 

Group Project: Redesigning a fireplace for the future market.

Advanced Product Design Engineering: Redesigning a DPV to better suit free divers.

Major Project: Assister SCUBA diving apparatus for adaptive divers

and not forgetting the Christmas brake with friends and family. needing time to relax. 

Saturday 13 November 2010

Small post.
It seems like I fried the original motherboard I brought from america, so ordered a new one. it arived a few days ago every works now it seems, all easily controllable. Happy face!

things left to do.

  • wire up extruder
  • remake some gears
  • test the it!
I haven't been able to focus all my attention on the Mendel currently due to so much work in 3rd year. But a major hand in is soon once that's over its mendel time!

Tuesday 5 October 2010

New Circuit Bed

Small update, laser cut the new circuit holder thing. now mounted on the side. looks a bit cluttered but should work out all fine.




Still waiting on the last few pieces before I can test to see if it works.