Weeks on How to Make (Almost) Anything

Week 1: Computer-aided design

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The idea is to have a way to manufacture extremely small free form features in metal by using electrical discharge machining (EDM) in a sinker configuration. EDM machines come in three flavors, there are wire based systems (previous students of this class have built such systems), they are very good for 2D features. Then there is a “machining type” where the tool is a cylinder which is moved across the part similar to a CNC. This however is even for EDM standards slow and the precision is inherited from the precision of the stages, and the last variant are so called sinkers. The tool is an electrically conductive piece of the negative to be manufactured, which gets driven into the part. Together with using resin based 3D printing which can achieve very accurate prints, this might be a way to get highly accurate fine featured metal parts which is interesting to many industries in a versatile and accessible way.

Week 2: Computer-controlled cutting

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This week had three parts: Using the plotter to create stickers, characterising the laser cutter on cardboard with a parameter sweep, and using the results to cut Gridfinity compatible boxes.

Stickers

I did not have a particular usage case this week for the cutting plotter therefore I stuck with making a simple vinyl sticker generated from an image. Probably I will come back in future weeks, but usage is very intuitive. The workflow is ether you bring your own SVG or other vector file format or you bring a picture and use software to make a svg out of it. There is a online software provided on that particular PC but technically it could be any compatible software doing that.

Week 3: Embedded programming

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Website update

Last week I created the file structure and the html files in forge directly, this led to a very simple webpage which was working and useful, however not that pretty and more importantly it is not a very scalable workflow. This week I finally came around to set up a proper workflow. I decided to give hugo a try even though I really like wordpress. I decided that I want to be able to see the changes I make locally and have a .git folder locally where I can commit changes to, this allows me to make snapshots of different states of my page without pushing every little change to the live website. Then when I’m satisfied with the result I can push the changes to the Forge repo.

Week 4: 3D scanning and printing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This week was about 3D scanning and 3D printing, two technologies I find very exciting. Both still come with their challenges. In my opinion the biggest ones are compute power, good software, the skills to operate that software and the printing parameters.

Compute power is reaching a point where we can load and process mesh files of several GB. This matters because highly complex geometries, often generated with tools like PicoGK or nTop, can now be processed without losing resolution beyond what the printing process can resolve anyway. The software is slowly becoming both user friendly and powerful, but I still see limitations in support generation, multi material and color printing. For 3D scanning, good software for reverse engineering is still hard to find. Printing parameters are mostly a solved problem, as long as you are willing to not buy the cheapest material.

Week 5: Electronics design

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This week I want to try something new: instead of typing out everything, I want to see if I can dictate my thoughts and therefore communicate them more extensively.

This week is about PCB design. I want to use this week to make the PCB for the sinker EDM machine I want to build as my final project.

In the beginning I was very unsure if I want to use KiCad or Fusion for building the PCB. In the end I settled for KiCad because I already know that software, I kind of like to keep software separated and I also like the open source aspect of KiCad: it is free and it is continuously developed by the community for the community, so in the end I will probably stay with KiCad. What I have not done so far is working with the RP2350. I think the RP2350 is a good choice for this project because of the PIOs, which can generate very precise pulses independent of the main code. I actually use the Pico 2 W, I don’t think I need the Wi-Fi right now but it might become useful in the future. The Pico 2 W comes with enough pins for the project and can run everything we need.

Week 6: Electronics production

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This week is about producing and testing a board. My plan was to produce Sparky, the spark generator board for my sinker EDM. I prepared everything so that JLCPCB can make and assemble the board, but in the end I decided to first mill and test smaller parts of it. The first part I tested is the interface to the linear stage, for this I made a simple XIAO board which only talks to the Zaber controller.