Are you able to ship us samples of the tubing you use / used / plan to use for building a v3 rotator? The pieces only need to be long enough to check for fit, not to make a complete mast or boom.
###Background
Several students are working on small changes to the v3 rotator design to reduce the unique number of parts, reduce the number of assembly steps, and to make adapting the printed parts to locally-available supplies easy (i.e. not requiring being a FreeCAD expert). We have posts about some of these changes at our Twitter account https://twitter.com/ValpoWIREDlab
There are several holes in the printed parts that need to be the correct diameter for whatever tube or pipe is being used for the cross boom and mast. A C.S. student is making a simple web app which takes the diameter of your available tubing and returns a print-ready STL file with the proper dimensions.
We want to test this system, before it goes live, with tubing and pipe from all over and not just the imperial standard sizes available to us locally. Sourcing metric parts is difficult for 2 reasons: we don’t really know what is “readily available” for you, and where you buy your supplies.
We have a small grant specifically written to buy or reimburse people for sending us metric-sized parts from all over the world. The parts are cheap but shipping is a bear, hence the extra funding.
@pierros and all LSF folks: we can reimburse for cost and shipping. Is it possible to gather bits from your v3 builds for physical size references? Or even new metric supplies. There is a pool of 400 USD that disappears at the end of December. Otherwise it will just be used to buy a truck load of printer filament…
We are able to send over what we got for the v3 design (especially the metric parts of the build). Please be advised that there are some additions and changes on the newest version of the design (on the encoder mounting mainly).
It would be great to have a meeting with your team too to review the additions/changes so we could possibly merge them on the repos (if you have something ready) or provide feedback.
Please email the address we need to use for sending over the parts. Thanks!
Hi @danwhite – I just came across this thread and wanted to follow up. The web app you mentioned sounds really intriguing…has it been released anywhere? There are always a lot of folks asking about imperial parts, so something like this sounds perfect!
@saintaardvark the web app project stalled in the depths of using FreeCAD’s python API to reach in and change the important dimensions. That API is … cough … lightly tutorial-ed. Knocking out that hurdle with some free(cad) time and the rest is effectively done. Available time is the key at the moment!
The rest of the system is a 1-screen Flask app.
… [2 hours later]
maybe I figured it out. Now, to get the student back on the task. Will update this thread when there is more action.
Here is a screenshot of my hack session in lieu of actual documentation, this is modifying “axis_spacer.fcstd”:
@danwhite that’s awesome – thanks so much for posting that! That definitely looks straightforward enough (easy for me to say, having never played with FreeCAD before ) – hopefully this is something that can be made useful relatively easily. I’ll see if I can bang away on this.
@saintaardvark FYI, the repo has grown scripts to edit a few parts. Still need to edit the script named for the part to update the desired tube diameter.
) – hopefully this is something that can be made useful relatively easily. I’ll see if I can bang away on this.