Today I finished the hollow part of the mold. I spent most of the day smoothing both parts of the mold with sandpaper and getting rid of some of the errors the CNC made. Some edges are simply not possible for the machine to make, so I have to manually adjust. It is turning out to be a very craftsy project.
It is hard to stop watching the machine while it slowly frees your design from a heavy block of chemical wood. Some CNC milling pr0n:
It is the 26th of November today, and we are in the 9th week of our artist in residence at the Waag Society. The project is progressing a lot and we are now starting to work on the networking and data exchange part of the project. We are simultaneously working on the cases for the electronics at the fablab. This week, Tom is visiting Amsterdam so we can put our heads together and work out how to finalize the project in the upcoming 3 weeks.
Waag Society posts on meshy here and here
Today we started making part 1 of the mold, to cast a case for the Meshy objects. We are using a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) milling machine (BZT pf 1000 c) at the Waag Society to mill out the shape. The machine is amazing, I can’t stop watching it. The material used to mill out the shape is OBO chemical wood, a very dense material that provides durable and high definition molds. The software that controls the machine is Deskproto, a 3D CAM software for rapid prototyping.
We decided to try out 3D milling for creating a case to house our electronics. The plan is to create a mold and cast 8 to 10 cases using a semi-flexible resin. The work flow would be: 1. create a 3D model of the mold 2. import this 3d model into the software that controls the CNC milling machine 3. mill the mold 4. cast the shapes. The Waag Society is hosting the Fablab from the end of August until the end of November 2007, so we were very lucky!
We had no previous experience with any of the steps mentioned before, but bravely set out to do the task. We started out using Wings3D but soon switched to Blender to model the shape. While learning how Blender was working, we quickly realized this was not the way to go. Blender works very differently from CAD/CAM softwares, which are meant for this type of work. Blender has no “real-world measurements” but measures everything in Blender units. It requires you to work in a low resolution and do a sub-surf modifier later to smooth an object, etc. etc. It is not suitable for this task. Running out of time, we got help from Bas Withagen, who created a 3D model in Rhino3D for us. We are still looking for an open source equivalent for this task. We will proceed with milling the model tomorrow.
The first iteration of the meshy board is here! It is super tiny and cute :) Tom is finished working on the last hardware problems today, so we can start doing the first software tests!
