Goals and Time Estimates:
Set up full size print at ITLL (1.5 hours)
Brainstorm new overall shapes (~2 hours)
Experiment in Rhino/grasshopper to create revisions (~6 hours)
Progress and Actual Time:
Last week I met with Joel to talk about the 'why' behind my project. He had seen my presentation at the end of last semester, so had a rough idea of what my concept was. But the more we discussed it, the more I started to realize that the important part of my project is the form of the lamp itself, and that my proposed idea of using arduino controlled LEDs wasn't actually adding very much to the project conceptually. So as of right now, I'm exploring ways to make the form of my lamp as aesthetically pleasing as possible, and simply light it with an LED light bulb.
Now that the campus is opened up, I was able to go to the ITLL to run my own 3d print jobs. I printed my working design for my light in full size to get a feel for how the printer works with overhangs in the outer contour mode I'm using. I found that the steepest overhangs print with gaps. To mitigate this, I've been working on updates to the grasshopper code to grow structures with less extreme overhangs. This is made somewhat difficult by the way the physics simulator tends to have the line accelerate quickly outwards when one part of the line has lots of curvature. I've been working on ways to increase the simulated damping, but if I reduce it too much, then the line doesn't grow at all. I've tried constraining the growth to a pre-specified allowed area, preventing the overhangs from exceeding a maximum angle. But this results in really weird behavior from the simulation, often causing the line to overlap itself, and a generally less aesthetic result. Currently I'm experimenting with ways to have the damping vary smoothly throughout the simulation, and reduce dramatically right at the point where the line typically grows quickly outwards.
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