Week 10 – Getting Smaller!
Platon B -
Hello Might Mustangs! 🐎
This week has seen a lot of progress, and although my resin printer is yet to be set up for the final prototype, I’ve been busy making different scaled prototypes to experiment with. Firstly, I tried to make a 1:1 scale braille housing of my larger model, but this has come with many problems. Because of the circular shape of each dot housing, I found it very hard to make a decent clearance for the CAMs to rotate (there is only about 2.5mm of clearance at most inside each hole).
Using this principle, I decided to continue making 1:1 model that are the actual braille size, only this time having a more rectangular design. This allowed for closer to 3.5 mm of clearance on average, although that is still not much at all! Making these incredibly small models on my 3D printer, I came to realize that this scale is simply impossible for my current (non-resin) printer. The prints would be jagged, unleveled, and even tiny irregularities would deem the whole housing unsuitable. Considering this, I’m now building up to a more workable scale until the resin printer is function, so I’ve tried 2:1 and 3:2 instead.
These models gave much more hope and even a couple function runs with a single dot, but they are still very small making it difficult to print properly made CAMs to go alongside. You can see in the picture below the size of the 1:1 CAM, it’s about 3 millimeters wide and 1 millimeter thick. This means each detail on them is in the level of microns, which is simply impossible on a standard printer. I have resin liquid and copper wiring on its way, and I’m excited to put all my designs to the test.
Here’s a picture of all of these week’s prototypes:
