Category: rapid prototyping

rapid prototyping weekly design discussions

The Crystal Palace

Watch the video and read the articles about the Crystal Palace. Give a written account of your thoughts on the industrial revolution, the Crystal Palace and how it has impacted the modern world.

I believe that the Crystal Palace is truly amazing not only in terms of it’s appearance, but in terms of the way it was constructed. It surely introduced a new approach to building construction, which is utilizing standardized pieces (if they are easy to make, bonus points follow) to assemble a grandiose piece is architecture. I believe it influenced the way architects looked at the building construction process and uplifted it to another level, perfectly reflecting how a lot of things that we use in our day-to-day life are made.

In our current challenge of building a spaghetti bridge we will use techniques to produce parts for our overall structures. Can you identify similarities in your process and how the Crystal Palace was created?

I am planning to use standardized-sized pieces to construct the bridge, which will make the re-build or add-ons much easier and efficient (just like it was with the Crystal Palace). Even though I use spaghetti instead of iron rods and withhold from glass, I believe the bridge that I will build still has some similarity in the method of combining the materials as the construction should be as balanced as possible to maintain the shape under as much pressure as possible.

Do some research on mass production and give 2 examples of techniques or processes used to mass produce products or components for products .

Almost everything we use now is mass-produced at some level. The assembling of our phones, our writing supplies, water bottles and even cars. And there are many techniques that emerged to optimize the process of the production:

Cellular Manufacturing – This concept separates the factory floor into different sections (cells). Machines are placed in a certain order so that materials flow naturally toward the completion of a product.
Machine Flexibility – This concept refers to the capacity of a factory’s machines to adapt. Can they be changed to manufacture different products? Will they allow for slight variations in design that customization requires?

source: https://www.manufacturing.net/home/article/13239976/a-guide-to-modern-manufacturing-methods

rapid prototyping weekly design discussions

Drinking Straws

Listen to the podcast and read the article about the history of the drinking straw. What is the most surprising thing you have learned about the straw and its history? Can you think of any other products that started out life to meet a specific need but evolved to be used by everyone? Answer these questions in this week’s blog post.

For me, the most surprising thing about the drinking straw was “created” so long ago. I would never guess that as I always seen straws kind of modern “quirk”.

Although, I am curious about why people several hundreds ago would even use them, did they use them to drink altogether from the same bowl or something? Not sure.

Also, the fact that it took the bendy straw to gain popularity so long seems counterintuitive to me as it is, in my opinion, so much more convenient to use than the straight one.

As for the products with similar story, I believe a while ago I read that Coca-Cola was invented to help people overcome their morphine addiction (that they usually acquired after being medically prescribed to take it during treatment after a war (i don’t remember which was)). It originally had cocaine in it (extracted from the some leaf), which was later removed.

P.S. found the source https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Coca-Cola-Company interestingly enough, of the Coca Cola website they don’t say anything about the cocaine 🙂

also, I found this website, while searching about Coca Cola, that lists 10 other inventions: https://www.businessinsider.com/successful-products-that-were-originally-intended-for-a-completely-different-purpose-2016-3

including Bubble Wrap, 7UP (spoiler: also was a drug), Frisbees, Chainsaws…

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week3: EggDrop

So, after the last week’s failure, I decided to implement a technique that i have seen all across the Web: the paper straws. Of course, we are not allowed to use the actual straws, however we are allowed to use paper. So, given that, I have created a new sketch of the prototype:

the idea behind the mechanics of the prototype os basically the same as the one behind the failed one, however this time it seems more reliable: the bulging parts are meant to absorb the shock energy, while the box is not supposed to even touch the ground.

the straws seem way more reliable as they were much better attached to the box (the attachment was solid, unlike the crumbled paper). plus, the straws are not easy to bend, which also seemed like a green flag.

the first assembly looked like that:

it had three vertical and three horizontal straws that with the box summed up to 8 pieces of A4 paper and much less tape than the previous try. the idea was to add as much straws as needed for a box to not touch the ground at any position after falling, as well as making sure that the energy absorbed by the straw will not transfer to the box in even larger pressure (as the area of their intersection would be smaller). as seen in the picture, the prototype looks promising. so, I decided to try it out:

and it worked! I was very excited. the bad thing about this prototype though is that i have to butcher it every time to show the egg. but it is alright. as the technique is repeatable, I will assemble it again, for the challenge on the lesson.

p.s. so, i am pretty happy that the previous idea didn’t work out as I probably wouldn’t have any particular idea on how to assemble something like that again.

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week2: EggDrop

IDEA 1 & FAILURE

This week as i was traveling a wasn’t able to post the blog on time. However, as I was unable to do actual experimentation, I only worked on my ideas. I developed some new ideas that I most certainly will incorporate into my final prototype.

After some googling i realized that there is not much options for me to create a parachute from paper. I had no idea how to do it so that i won’t use all 10 allowed A4 papers, so i decided to leave this idea for later, if the others won’t work out.
I decided that i will put egg in a box. I learned how to do a perfect box from 2 paper sheets a while ago, so I decided to implement this skill here. I decided to do so mainly because it would be much easier and effective for me to attach (using tape) the other parts of the construction (the ones meant to absorb the energy from the fall) to a paper box than an egg (due to symmetrical and larger shape. that is how two paper boxes look together (there is where i put my egg in. it is not exactly stable there but i thought it is not a big deal as it was my first experiment anyway).

p.s. my personal record of folding a box reached 3 minutes. (the first box I folded in 7 minutes…..)

When surfing the Web, i encountered with way of folding paper (like accordion basically) and it seemed quite “jumpy”. I thought i could use it to create a “jumpy” construction by attaching it to sides of the egg’s shell So i decided to check it out. In the video below i am demonstrating what this material is capable of, which, spoiler, was not exactly what i was looking for.

as it turns out, this accordion style only works it falls exactly on the right spot for it to fold. plus, i didn’t really know how to attach it to the box (or anything else) using tape to reserve the jumpiness, so i decided to move on from that for now.

I also was thinking about crumbled paper as a material to observe some energy. and as i already had the needed materials and knew how to attach it to the box. So I went for it and created a sketch of the prototype.

the idea is to shell the box with the egg with multiple “balls” of crumbled paper (numbers 1-4 are created from the A4s, while numbers 5-12 (8 pieces) created from cut in half A4s) + the box, for this prototype I used up the total 2 (box) + 4 + 4(8 halves) = 10 a4 papers. which is the maximum. I know. But it is my first prototype that I decided to actually assemble so I believe it is fine.

the final piece looked like this:

yes, kind of messy. To be honest, the messiness came when I realized that attaching those crumbled pieces to the edges of the box (which I thought will be easy) turned out to be impossible using just one piece of tape. so, here we go. plus, i added some tape to stick the box’s parts together as well. halfway through I started revolving the construction around to check what places of the box still can potentially touch the paper. You can see it on the video as well. Also, in the video below I am showing how I was trying to increase the effectiveness of the attachment of the crumbled paper by creating this space for the edge to kind of fold into. didn’t really help but should count as a valuable attempt.

I couldn’t wait to try the construction out already. So I did it. And it failed me.

I was kind disappointed but wasn’t really surprised. The construction involved too much tape for it to be viable and cool. I have some other ideas left, but about that in another post.

prototyping documentation rapid prototyping

week1: EggDrop

As I am currently in quarantine, I am unable to access the necessary materials at the moment to fully explore the possibilities of paper. However, I was able to find numerous videos on the internet on how people do the Egg Drop challenge.

As for now, while I am waiting to receive some paper from the hotel, I would like to put down main ideas that I have now:

Creating a parachute for the egg. I would connect the egg to the parachute. And maybe add a platform at the bottom.
Wrap the egg around using paper and fix the egg inside of the paper cocoon.

The main idea would be to either slow down the falling of the egg or to create a bottom platform that could fold so that the energy from the egg falling would go into this paper deformation (instead of applying this energy to the egg). Or both: