Custom Inflatables Are Only A Laser Beam Away

April 2, 2019 by Tom Nardi 26 Comments

Carl Sagan one said “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” It might not be a very accurate description of the relative difficulty level of baking, but the logic is sound enough: there’s often a lot of ground work that needs to be to covered before you hit your ultimate goal. A perfect example of this principle is the inflatable raft that [ralph124c] hopes to eventually create; before he can set sail he has to perfect making balloon animals with his laser cutter.

In the long run, the raft will be constructed from sheets of TPU coated fabric that are fused together with a hot iron. But before he spends the time and money on building the real thing, he wants to do some scaled down tests to make sure his design works as expected. He makes a cryptic remark about learning the hard way that inflatables are prone to bouts of strange behavior, and out of an overabundance of caution we’ll just take his word for it.

He hoped to test his designs with the much cheaper LDPE film, but he found that the hot iron didn’t fuse it together in the way he was hoping. His mind turned to his 60 watt laser cutter, and wondered if the desired effect could be achieved by turning the power down as low as possible and quickly moving across the material.

His first attempts either blew right through the film or did absolutely nothing, but eventually he had the bright idea to move the laser farther from the LDPE. This put the beam out of focus, which not only expanded the area it would cover, but reduced the energy being delivered to the surface. With a bit more experimentation, he found he was able to neatly weld the pieces of material together. He even found that he could increase the power slightly to cut through the film without having to adjust the laser focus. With the ability to create complex inflatable shapes, perhaps [ralph124c] will create balloon version of Carl Sagan or an apple pie to celebrate.

Of course, this technology isn’t limited to birthday balloons and model rafts. The ability to quickly and easily produce custom inflatable shapes could be a huge boon to anyone working in soft robotics, and we’ve even seen similar concepts applied to haptic feedback systems.

[Thanks to Arthur for the tip.]

Shipwreck Exploration Vessels Fit In Minivan; Stream To Internet

June 2, 2016 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

Having to work away from the convenience of a workshop can be tough. But it’s sometimes unavoidable and it always means planning ahead. When the work area also happens to be 150m under a lake’s surface, it’s much more of a challenge – but it’s both doable and more accessible than you might think. To prove it, this DIY research vessel will be part of the robotic exploration of an underwater shipwreck. It is complete with an Ethernet bridge, long-range wireless communications, remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV), the ability to hold a position, and more. The best part? It can all be packed up and fit into a minivan. We can’t put it any better than the folks at the OpenROV Forums:

In just over a week (June 6th – 9th), a bunch of people from OpenROV are going to attempt to dive a set of specially modified deep-capable ROVs to a 50m-long shipwreck at a depth of 150m below lake Tahoe. We’ll be using a deployment architecture that we’ve been perfecting over the years that involves a very small boat keeping station over the dive site while the rest of the people on the expedition run the mission from a remote location via long-range broadband radio. Since the mission control site will have an internet connection, we’ll be able to live stream the entire dive over the internet.

The purpose of the design was “to demonstrate that many of the capabilities one might think would require a large research vessel can actually be achieved with off-the-shelf parts that are more portable and much less expensive. […] There’s a lot to discover down there, and the technology readily available these days can allow us to explore it.” This mindset happens to wonderfully complement the kickoff of the Citizen Scientist Challenge portion of the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

For those times when your work can remain on solid ground, one method is to sidestep the entire issue of working away from the workshop by simply making your whole work area mobile like this incredible conversion of a truck trailer to a mobile lab.