Good Enough to Start With - Cut and Run

I got something right on the first try, then spent a full day trying and failing to make it better - only to realize it didn't really need to be improved. But like most dead ends, I learned a lot of useful stuff along the way.

Last week I posted about a 3d printed template for cutting, slashing and modifying fabric. The design was a success, both because it was easy to customize and print new designs with only a few minutes work for each pattern, and because it actually helped making clean straight cuts in tee-shirts.

Not satisfied, I continued to think of new ways to use this approach until I reached the limits of the first design. I wanted bigger better, smaller faster, simpler yet more complex designs. Are you beginning to suspect I might have gotten carried away?

Sure, the template worked. But I noticed that any design with the slots closer than about 10mm started to create problems. Common tee-shirt fabric, being all stretchy and flimsy, was particularly problematic. It would stretch, gather and distort when the cutting slots got too close together. This really sucked because slashing old tee-shirts was the original impetus behind the entire concept.

I also noticed that very thin or slippery fabrics like sateen, or very thick fabrics like denim didn't always work very well. If I was careful, I could do both. But I had to take care to hold the template just right and position and lay out the fabric correctly.

A simple, first try success wasn't good enough. I had to make it better. I had a serious case of designer fever.

What I needed were some cleats or ridges and matching grooves to really clamp down on the cloth and hold it in place.

So I started a redesign of the entire template system. I spent half of a day thinking about it and drawing simple sketches. What if I put cleats or ridges on the surfaces, maybe add matching indentations to really clinch the cloth and keep it from moving.

I did several sketches like that. I got a feel for a way to draw the "features" easily. And then started thinking about how to automate the process so that I could type in a few numbers and the pattern would magically draw itself.

The first (successful) version simply extruded shapes up from the ground plane, the cut or joined the shapes to create two slotted plates. But this new cleated, wavy system wouldn't work like that. Now, I had to extrude on two or even three planes and somehow coordinate the origins and geometries across multiple drawing steps.

That was kind of annoying. I had to redo all my old work/ And, because I wasn't sure which, if any. of the new shapes would work, I  needed to find the simplest method of automating multiple styles of cleats and clips and waves.

I couldn't find any one style that worked for all shapes, so I wound up generating several different files with completely different automation strategies.

Getting a flat face to match with another flat face is easy. getting curved and notched faces to mate with other curved faces with varying distances between them, well that isn't nearly as easy. Especially if the surfaces curve in all directions at once.

Automating that process is even harder. Boy did I learn a lot.

Or what if I made the entire surface wavy - yeah, that would really lock them together.

I spent about a full day concepting then drawing and automating these new designs. I was getting closer, but also getting frustrated. Then I went back to look at the results from the first tests and realized something.

I didn't need to do all this.

Seriously, I'm never going to be cutting two hundred strips of cloth that are only 2mm wide. That's just ridiculous. Look at any example of slashed tee-shirt mods. They have a few (10-20) cuts and the strips are at least an inch wide, not a hundred tiny cuts.

This project was supposed to be about slapping down a template on a worn out tee and making 10 or 20 relatively straight cuts in a few seconds.

I had gotten carried away and was trying to create a process that would rival the precision of a laser cutter. Why do that?

So I stopped the design and tried to feel better about the day I had just lost to stupidity. It was probably the easiest part of the day. I did actually learn a lot, and any time you find new ways of doing things it's a win. If not today, then sometime soon.

There are parts that I can still use in this design. I can use some of the new ideas in other projects. I'm working on a metal and paper embosser where these techniques are useful. A lot of these ideas are also applicable for sliding joints for lids and cases. And this exploration helped me get a better grasp on basing multi-plane geometries off a single origin point.

So like most failures, I got a lot of useful information to use. So maybe that day wasn't a complete loss after all. Now I'm off to cut up more old shirts.

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Weather Station Might Need Some Rework

I'm thinking this might be a good time to rework the interface for my DIY Bluetooth weather station. Sure, I can tell a lot about the precipitation and wind just by looking at the station, but it's not sending any useful data to the display.

It might be time to bring the weather station inside so I can manually control the physical inputs. It's too cold to be outside and it's always fun to sit in the living room madly twisting, spinning, blowing and shaking a large plastic porcupine of sensors while looking at quickly moving, squiggly lines on my phone..

Weather stations in winter can be a bit unreliable. My "rain gauge" reads zero, but I'm pretty sure there has been some precipitation recently just from looking. I might bring it inside and work on the graphic display of the Bluetooth receiver.

I'm not looking forward to coding again, at least not this project. It works now, works very well in fact. But from what I remember I wrote some good, tight code - then got excited and went on an experimental streak. So there is probably lots of orphaned threads and poorly conceived routines wrapped around the well written, well documented portion of the program.

However, after a few months of successful testing with a Bluetooth data stream, I realize that I need to use another communication protocol with a longer range (probably LORA) so I can get the weather station into an area where the wind and rain won't be affected by surrounding structures. With Bluetooth I can only get 40-50 feet away from the house. But with LORA I could easily get 250 feet. That's enough to get the sensors out into an unobstructed area.

The station and my DIY display works well enough to give me a reasonable idea of what's going on and a basic record of overnight activity. But I also want to add a few more capabilities and display features.

If I do actually work on the display I'll try to document the process this time. It's actually pretty cool and fun to play with - plus it uses some basic interface techniques I've re-used several times. The real problem with blogging about it is that there is Android code, Arduino code, interface concerns, data storage and translation and .... well you get the picture. There's a lot going on.

But maybe if I write about each part as it happens I won't get bogged down in trying to create one huge, master tutorial. At the very least, I'll post some pics of the interface.

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Slashed Tee-Shirt with a Template - First Look

Slashed tee-shirts were all the rage a few years ago, Then they fell out of favor for a while. Now, they appear to be making a comeback with much more elaborate, commercially produced forms. I made a few attempts at cool fashion tees and got frustrated because mine always looked even rougher and more home made than they were supposed to - ragged, crooked cuts with even worse weaving.
Who knew I was so bad with a pair of scissors?

But I'm willing to try again. This time I made a 3d printed cutting-template to help me cut clean, straight lines for easier weaving and crisper shapes.

The cloth fits between two slotted plates. The plates lock together and hold the cloth in place while it's cut with a craft blade. 

The template itself is a simple idea, but I'm using Fusion 360's parametric functions to make the template easily customizable.

Now, with just a few clicks I can change the size and thickness of the cutting plates,and the size and spacing of the cut lines. I can also apply any shape to the slots.

Don't know how often I will personally use it, But I know some folks who are going through their custom-tee phase that might enjoy having these.

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Shadow Screen Basic How-To Tips

Dare I reveal the secret of shadow casting? People really liked the shadow casting screen I posted about last week. But it's incredibly difficult to do and requires super sophisticated yet extremely arcane knowledge of the underlying forces of the universe.

LOL, not really!!! Actually it's very simple and would make a great project for any designer wanting to experiment with basic 3d printing.

And as an added benefit, the screen not only casts very cool shadows, it also changes its appearance as you move around it. I've only scratched the surface of this technique, but I'm having a blast experimenting.

Sections of the screen darken and lighten at different times as the viewer moves around the screen. You can control when each section darkens in several ways. These include changing the size of the open slots as well as the depth of that section of the screen itself.

If you have ever twisted a venetian blind to control the amount of sunlight, then you understand all you need to know to create one these shadow screens. It's just that the scale and repetition of the elements made the project look complicated.

The same techniques also cast interesting shadows that change as the sun moves.

Basically, you create a grid of very thin walls. You control how quickly any one section darkens by varying the width of the slots and the height of the walls. There are other things you can do, but these two variables in combination give you all kinds of interesting effects, certainly enough to entertain you for a week or so and a spool of filament.

I have tried to explain the technique, but either the misleading appearance of sophisticated visual magic confuses people or I'm not very good at explaining things. So I decided to draw some diagrams to better explain it. These might help, or they might just confuse people even more.

Either way, they were a good exercise for me. I got to play with a vector illustration program again, and it forced me to think about how I was explaining the technique. I occasionally write a tutorial on the Instructables site, and I really enjoy that process and sharing with other makers. But if I don't practice writing and illustrating enough, I find that the process becomes painful instead of fun.  If I can figure out what I want to say and how to explain and illustrate it, I might even write a full tutorial on this technique.

So let me know if this blog post helps you understand how these screens are made. Am I on the right track or just confusing things even more?

I'll post a link to any tutorials I write, so stay tuned and keep making.

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Teaser for 3d Printed Shadow Caster

Here's a quick preview/teaser of a project (theme") I am working on - a 3d printed shadow caster.

A little fun with sunlight and shadow patterns.

The shadow-caster throws patterns from sunlight or lightbulbs. The shapes and darkness of the shadows changes depending on where the light source is. This gives a really neat effect as the sun moves throughout the day.

And as you walk past the shade the surface of the 3d printed object changes its appearance, so the effect is constantly changing.

UPDATE: Did a quick how-to and tip guide for this

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Jewelry that Flickers and Flits with Pictures

Here's another way to add beautiful lighting effects to your jewelry. Tiny, inexpensive graphic screens are easy to embed in your projects. They aren't as bright and showy as LEDs like Neopixels, but they give you the ability to craft very customized light and color effects. You can animate them and even display images. And of course you can control them with an Arduino.

A really simple pattern adds a lot of visual interest to this millefiori piece. The pattern changes slowly over time to give the pendant a constantly transforming appearance. The light really helps draw the eye in dim lighting. If you don't want that, simply turn off the screen. You can create any pattern, animation or even image that you want and change them as slowy or quickly as you desire.

I'm going to use fused glass as an example again. I like to work with fused glass because it poses so many challenges and can have so many different forms. Each piece is unique and calls for a careful pairing of light.

And because fused glass is pretty all by itself, it's also challenging not to overpower the innate beauty of the material. Last week I posted about using a simple LCD light valve to add interest. That works well with semi-transparent glass.You can also use these tiny graphics screens to add patterns and lights to the same piece of glass.

However, I have struggled to find something that woks well with clear glass pieces. Nothing ever worked well in pieces that had areas of transparent glass. So I hauled out my LCD screen collection and tried some of them. I think this technique has some definite possibilities.






Both Adafruit and Sparkfun have a wide range of sizes and form factors for these types of screens. For jewelry, the "deck of cards" size is probably the biggest you would need for your largest statement pendant. I prefer the matchbook sized ones. I have played with the tiny thumbnail sized versions, but after getting diffused there isn't that much difference between them and a much cheaper LED.

Here are just a few of the screen sizes available. (That's a US quarter for scale)

There are a few things to remember when choosing a screen:

If you want to display actual images then you need to make sure the screen comes with an SD card slot so you can store the image or images.

Don't forget about the monochrome black-and-white versions if all you need is a gentle flicker. There are also versions where the entire screen can be any single color and you can draw in black.

The faster your microprocessor is the faster you can change the screen display. This might not be important to you. I can code and design animations well enough to get small chips to do what I need. But if you want to do fancy animations consider using a more powerful chip like the M0. With the Pi Zero, you could even play videos using the same screens.

You can use traditional tools like Photoshop or Illustrator to create your patterns and images. For people who don't code, this makes this technique much more accessible. You an also use code to draw over and manipulate images, so it offers the best of both worlds.

I will keep using the LEDs and NeoPixels for jewel based. big bling style projects. And the 3d printed jewelry actually needs all the brightness NeoPixels provide just to show through the plastic during daytime.

But the more I play with LCD graphic screens and glass the more possibilities I see. I've got several ideas, and the really neat thing about his technique is that you can leave the screen off to emphasize the beauty of the glass itself - or you can show any solid color, pattern, animation or image on the exact same piece.

In fact, the same piece of glass can be given a completely new "look" by changing what's on the display.

I'll post more images of my experiments soon, and I think I might need to start doing video just to better demonstrate the effects possible with this combo.

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