[HN Gopher] 3D printed mirror array
___________________________________________________________________
3D printed mirror array
Author : agmm
Score : 991 points
Date : 2021-11-11 19:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| xmonkee wrote:
| This is so adorable
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| Seriously, can it get much better than this?
| zardo wrote:
| It should be possible to do animation driven by the movement
| of the sun in the sky.
| tdeck wrote:
| Similar to a digital sundial
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_sundial
| nazgul17 wrote:
| Fantastic! I love the creativity that went into this.
| zw123456 wrote:
| Archimedes would be proud! And you should be too!
|
| Congrats, and thank you so much for sharing this, it totally made
| my day.
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| Wow how wonderfully geeky romantic. Did he say yes ? [Edit the
| sand said yes!]
| matteosb wrote:
| This reminds me of company called Leva.
|
| Check out this project https://www.leva.io/projects/kinetic-wall
| tarikozket wrote:
| hats off
| jhgb wrote:
| I'm wondering if a similar effect couldn't be done using a
| continuous surface and just silvering it. I saw something similar
| done with refraction but can't remember the URL now. 3D printers
| definitely have higher resolution than mirrors of this size.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you're willing to spend a lot of money on silver then
| probably yes. After all the height differences are substantial
| and silver isn't cheap. 3D printers resolution sucks in
| comparison to the mirrors, I'm not sure what you mean by that.
| jhgb wrote:
| Not quite sure you need _that_ much silver. You need some
| filler between the silver layer and the crude plastic surface
| to get the silvering smooth, but that filler doesn 't
| necessarily need to be silver. As for the resolution, I'm
| judging it from this picture:
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bencbartlett/3D-printed-
| mi... - there seems to be almost two orders of magnitude of a
| difference between the size of a flat mirror and the size of
| the "printing step".
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Aluminizing it would be way cheaper than silver.
|
| For that matter, you could probably glue down pieces of
| aluminized mylar rather than using mirrors, since you all you
| need is a spot of light, not a full-blown mirror image.
| Aluminized mylar is pretty cheap!
| jacquesm wrote:
| Bare aluminum would oxidize in a very short time to
| something dull. It would still reflect light but not quite
| as good.
|
| Aluminized Mylar would definitely work, but that's not bare
| aluminum but aluminum with a shiny layer over it to keep it
| clean.
|
| Very useful stuff, I built huge solar concentrators with
| it. 1000 suns on an area the size of a poststamp. You can
| do some pretty crazy stuff with that kind of energy
| density.
| kragen wrote:
| You might need a micron of thickness of aluminum or
| silver. This piece looks like it's about 300 mm x 300 mm,
| which would work out to 90 mm3 of silver (or aluminum),
| which at 10.5 g/cc would work out to 950 mg of silver.
| Silver currently costs US$25.25 per troy ounce, so this
| would be 0.12C/ (US$0.0012) of silver, or somewhat less
| of aluminum.
|
| Both silver and aluminum will tarnish if exposed to the
| air, silver more slowly but much more completely.
|
| The process for silvering things is a lot easier to do at
| small scales than the process for aluminizing them.
| Aluminizing things normally requires a fairly good
| vacuum, and, moreover, a vacuum chamber large enough to
| fit whatever you're aluminizing. Perhaps someone will
| come up with some kind of convenient wet process for
| doing it but I'm not hoding my breath.
|
| By contrast, you can silver glass with Tollens' test,
| using distilled water, silver nitrate, concentrated
| aqueous ammonia, hydroxide of potassium or sodium, and a
| reducing sugar (almost any sugar that isn't sucrose, for
| which you can substitute numerous other chemicals, such
| as formaldehyde, formate, isopropanol, or tartrate). This
| is commonly done as a classroom demonstration in
| chemistry labs nowadays, and it was done on a large scale
| almost 150 years ago for telescope mirrors. Nitric acid
| is beneficial but, unless you have to make the silver
| nitrate, not essential.
|
| This is why it's much more common for amateur telescope
| makers to silver their mirrors rather than aluminizing
| them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've silvered a lot of copper plates for photography
| (Daguerrotypes).
| numpad0 wrote:
| There are single solution spray-on electroless plating
| "paint" for modelmaking. They can make any smooth and black
| surface into a mirror so I think it's just a matter of
| surface preparations.
| michaelt wrote:
| Can they actually produce a mirror you could mistake for a
| glass mirror?
|
| I assume if your mirror is "only" as good as as the shiny
| side of some aluminium foil, you can't project things with
| any detail.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Isn't the mirror surface effectively at the aperture in
| this system...
| itronitron wrote:
| You could use reflective mylar tape over the surface. And if
| you wanted something with very high resolution I'd try vacuum
| forming wide mylar film onto the 3D printed surface.
| perlgeek wrote:
| I don't think so; the angling of the mirrors is done with small
| steps, which the mirrors smooth out.
|
| If you apply a very thin film, it will just follow the steps.
| jcmontx wrote:
| Cool af! Congrats
| blunte wrote:
| Nice. Now step 2: individually articulated mirrors :)
| colinmegill wrote:
| Congrats! Wonderful!
| jstanley wrote:
| Excellent. I wonder how practical it would be to put each mirror
| on a servo so that you can change the image in real time?
| mrnotcrazy wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwCmzwSE98o&list=RDCMUCUbDcU...
| I don't know if you would need a server for each mirror? but
| you would need.... two axis of rotation? and making a
| mechanical system that slowly moved mirror by mirror to update
| the position might be more complex.
| [deleted]
| ortusdux wrote:
| Depends on the desired scale -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nb8mM3uEIc
| nomel wrote:
| This is quite a bit different. DLP like projectors are
| binary: straight forward or somewhere away. The layout of the
| grid of mirrors matches the layout of the dots you can
| illuminate, in the image. Something like OP has would require
| some pretty serious angular precision.
| beecafe wrote:
| You could use holography/beamforming to steer a beam from a
| DLP, although it would be just a small % of the original
| power.
| nomel wrote:
| I think the beautify of the mirror system is that it's
| direct, understandable/observable, and nice to look at by
| itself, even if it's not showing an image. It's elegant.
| If you use beam formers and DLPs, you're just making an
| overcomplicated DLP projector that's going to look like
| an overcomplicated DLP projector.
| beecafe wrote:
| Absolutely. And it'll keep working on a sandy beach far
| from any power source.
| jjk166 wrote:
| You'd probably want to use galvos instead of servos for this
| application (high speed/precision, low load mass).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or piezo.
| martinky24 wrote:
| Look up "Adaptive Optics". That's literally what you describe
| :) They've got a somewhat niche use in astrophotography.
| regularfry wrote:
| Almost trivial, if you're prepared to make the mirrors a bit
| bigger. I've got a 7-element array on my workbench right now.
| You want two servos per mirror, one for each axis. I'm using
| flexures for linkages between the servos and the mirrors, and
| universal joints made of magnets and ball bearings to hold
| everything together. The mirror tiles I'm using are 110mm
| across, flat-to-flat, which are bigger than this example, and
| that makes layout and assembly straightforward in a way that it
| wouldn't be if everything was smaller. Everything's printed in
| PETG, raspberry pi pico for brains driving a pca9685 PWM driver
| over i2c. The linkage geometry is the only hard part, the CAD
| and printing was pretty much a one-weekend project.
| regularfry wrote:
| Should probably point out that with 2 servos per mirror you
| can match surface normals but not surface offsets. You can
| make each individual mirror match the gradient of a curve,
| but you can't make a curve like the parabolic dish in the
| GitHub link without a third servo per mirror. I'm waiting for
| more parts to arrive for that...
| anfractuosity wrote:
| You can get MEMS microscanners although they're probably a bit
| small - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscanner but they can
| orientate a mirror on two axes.
|
| This one looks a pretty decent size -
| https://www.sercalo.com/products/mems-mirrors/mm160110-2
| jacquesm wrote:
| Swiss made precision optical gear. I think the price of that
| little mirror just might make your head spin.
| wopsahl wrote:
| Has anyone seen the mirror array that was built with
| ~2"X2"stainless steel mirrors that are attached to a sheet of
| blue spring steel that was laser cut as a compliant mechanism for
| each mirror so when an offset wheel on a threaded bolt behind the
| mirror is turned it progressively tilts the mirror from a minimal
| angle to a maximum angle? Each bolt was then driven using a
| single stepper motor(one mirror adjustment motor for the whole
| array, kind of a budget build, instead of one motor per mirror)on
| a belt driven x-y frame. The mirror array was positioned
| horizontally 2' off the floor of a museum with works of art, a
| camera is then pointed at an angle near eyelevel probably 20'
| away from the array. Then you choose an art work and the mirrors
| are rotated through their angles and when that pixel(mirror)
| reflects the color back to the camera that matches the art work
| you chose it stops moves to the next mirror and then repeats
| until there is a full image made of reflected light. Obviously
| the final image is pixelated but roughly resembles the original
| work. I saw this years ago and can no longer find any of it
| online. I've tried every search combination I could think of.
| Some of these details might be wrong but I'm just going off
| memory here. Pls help
| tdrdt wrote:
| I have been thinking about this for some time: cylinders each
| attached to a motor. The glossy end of the cylinders is cut at
| an angle. The rotation of each cylinder dictates from which
| direction light is reflected.
| snypher wrote:
| It sounds like a Danny Rozin piece
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Rozin
|
| Edit; I'm sure it could be
| https://www.smoothware.com/danny/mirrorsmirror.html
| wopsahl wrote:
| These are close but it was definitely horizontal these are
| vertical. Thank you for the links!!
| nikkinana wrote:
| That's sweet except he's a faggot.
| [deleted]
| dcroley wrote:
| This idea looks like something you could commercialize!
| _Microft wrote:
| I might be getting old but this is the sort of magic by
| technology I would like to see more of in the world instead of
| using tech to try putting people into fake worlds in some
| metaverse.
| gnramires wrote:
| I don't think the particular metaverses available right now
| seem that good, but I don't share the consistent prejudices
| against virtual reality. Why is real reality any better? You
| can build awesome stuff in virtual reality as well (in fact,
| you can build almost anything imaginable, at a much lower
| cost).
|
| Keeping in touch with reality is extremely important (because
| we are bound by its rules after all), but virtual existence has
| enormous potential as well :)
|
| (that can't be realized, and certainly not realized for
| everyone, in the world of atoms -- virtual reality is
| delightfully egalitarian)
|
| Value the bits _and_ atoms!
| spijdar wrote:
| Just a thought, but one reason to be skeptical of virtual
| reality, if only out of pragmatism, is that unlike "real"
| reality, virtual reality is trivially controllable by single
| entities.
|
| Maybe not an intrinsic limitation, but for the foreseeable
| future, VR = a domain where some entity like Facebook is
| effectively omniscient and omnipotent.
| r00fus wrote:
| VR is a better mousetrap to keep people engaged and connected
| (two things FB values a lot as it drives revenue).
|
| What real-world problems does VR serve for the average FB
| user? Or anyone frankly?
|
| Meanwhile, 3D printing could greatly improve how we design
| and fabricate things people use every day.
| [deleted]
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| There is nothing special about this. This is the basis of all
| MEMS technology used in lidar. Some VR goggle designs probably
| contain MEMS parts too. It is disingenuous to complain about
| the metaverse business model while oohing and aahing over the
| exact same technology used to implement it.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're
| trying to avoid flamewars here, and I'm sure you can make
| your substantive points without that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| I mean, I don't think the parent post was that substantive
| either. There is nothing in this submission that
| necessitates roping in the topic of the metaverse. They
| could have just left it as they found this tech
| interesting.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you can't say something nice about a project like this
| then say nothing at all. To belittle it is classless.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| true
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Agreed. I really, really hate it when someone shares
| something cool they've made and HN people dump on it.
|
| I'm not saying that HN has to be all mindless
| cheerleading, but non-constructive criticism is not
| helpful to anyone (except the critic's ego, maybe).
| dang wrote:
| Sure, but there are degrees of these things. The GP
| comment was generic, which does have a bad effect on
| discussion (it evokes shallower and often nastier things
| from others), but the comment I replied to took things a
| few notches further.
| ape4 wrote:
| The wedding is going to be over the top
| a_lost_needle wrote:
| Well, it definitely looks like it will be pretty gay! :)
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Such a cool idea. Now you have a momento to remember the day that
| can be hung on a wall.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I was going to suggest you could use it as a home decoration to
| make a message everyday but it would only work one day a year?
| saboot wrote:
| You'd need the mirror planes to be adjustable in the XY tilt
| directions. Seems doable though, would be a cool next project
| enchiridion wrote:
| Or not? That's an interesting challenge. Multiple messages
| depending on the light angle
| ansible wrote:
| Sort of the opposite of a digital sundial:
|
| https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1068443
| fudged71 wrote:
| It's possible to create artificial light with parallel rays
| like the sun, you just need a parabolic dish mirror. So in
| theory yes you could do this at home for everyday projections,
| just not with the sun.
| totetsu wrote:
| Now how could we achieve the same thing with just origami?
| https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/features/origami.html
| tomaskafka wrote:
| At a risk of spoiling a startup idea, I'd love a set of motorized
| mirrors I could put on a roof of a house on the other side of the
| street from me, that would send sunlight to the eastern side of
| my flat during the afternoon :).
| mym1990 wrote:
| It's like the Uber of renting other peoples roofs! (I've been
| watching way too much shark tank the past 3 days...)
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| I would love an array of them in the style of old airport
| signages could be an amazing effect. Great work.
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| There is an artist (at least) that uses arrays of motorized parts
| to create a similar effect
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV8v2GKC8WA mesmerizing
| qwertox wrote:
| Thank you for linking this.
| djmips wrote:
| These isn't a similar effect but your link is very cool. I
| think the magic here is a static array of mirrors printed to
| create an image on another surface from multiple reflections of
| a bright source light.
| mlok wrote:
| This is quite close too : https://prusalab.cz/projekty/reflexe/
|
| (Petr Vacek & Adam Cigler / Prusalab / Czech Republic)
| m4rtink wrote:
| I saw this on an industry fair and even spoke with one of the
| authors - its very impressive and cleverly done + they are
| continuously improving it. :)
| mlok wrote:
| I also had the chance to see it, and I agree with you :
| impressive. Glad to know it is still evolving.
| mygoodaccount wrote:
| Who is on the Cover of WIRED 1999? Can someone please find out.
| matteosb wrote:
| check out this as well https://www.leva.io/projects/kinetic-
| wall
| mym1990 wrote:
| I've always been interested in making large works of art out of
| many many small things(LED cubes, wooden blocks, etc...). Would
| love to explore these kinds of things more
| abrookewood wrote:
| That's fascinating - the artist does everything himself from
| fabrication to design. Looks incredible.
| jonahx wrote:
| "The electronics and the mechanics and the fabrication took me
| a year. Then it took me an afternoon to program the computer to
| actually activate it"
| arketyp wrote:
| No knock on the artist, I particularly like the pom-pom
| display, but I get the sense that much of art today is about
| going roundabout ways, almost Rube Goldberg machine like, to
| achieve things could be presented in other ways with minimal
| effort. Sometimes this alternative mediation is interesting,
| but sometimes it almost feels dismissive of the metaphysical
| magic that is computing.
| berkes wrote:
| A lot of art is about "the process".
|
| I mean, the resulting painting as done by Pollock or
| Mondriaan is pretty silly. Just splash some paint in a
| canvas, or draw some lines and use the "fill bucket tool"
| to create colored squares, right?
| arketyp wrote:
| Yes, sure, it's about the process and about the
| inescapable context with postmodern conceptual art.
| Whether it's mere splashes I will leave aside, but
| Pollock and Mondrian precisely brought the consideration
| of the process to a new light, that's part of what makes
| them significant figures. Mondrian didn't have
| mspaint.exe, those geometries meant something different
| at the time. Also, I don't think Picasso would have been
| so infatuated by cubism if computers with triangle mesh
| rendering and solid modeling had been around.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Awesome! It's like a giant static DLP chip!
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| You are correct! This is essentially how office projectors work
| https://youtu.be/KpatWNi0__o?t=102
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Very cool.
|
| In a less-artistic application, you could use this idea to print
| multiple sections that could be assembled to make a large pseudo-
| parabolic mirror for a solar concentrator. You wouldn't get
| telescope-quality imaging, certainly, but if all you needed was
| to concentrate a lot of light on a small space (for a steam
| generator, say) it should work fine.
|
| Congrats on the upcoming wedding!
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| This made my day! Nothing technical to say sorry!
| fgblanch wrote:
| This project is soooo amazing! Congrats! Great piece of art and
| engineering
| intrasight wrote:
| I wonder if rather than "additive" you could do similar with
| "subtractive" fabrication. Take a wooden board and cnc mill and
| cut circles on the surface at the appropriate orientations.
| ruined wrote:
| generally it's just a matter of slicing the same source STL
| file to the appropriate gcode, but in this case the particular
| geometry (lots of sharp concave angles) seems more suited to
| additive manufacturing.
| serf wrote:
| yes, but it'd require a redesign or very special tooling.
|
| that spacing between each mirror 'pedestal' is fairly deep,
| it'd require a very long end-mill or a five axis machine to be
| able to get into those crevices.
|
| it'd be trivial to carve the needed angle into each 'mirror
| pedestal' , but the current design doesn't support the premise
| very well.. still, doable.
| intrasight wrote:
| How about this approach. Just have a collection of wooden
| dowels with one end milled to be concave at one of 20 or 30
| angles. Then you can assemble whatever mirror array you want
| by selecting and positioning the appropriate dowels. Or sold
| as a kit made out of plastic hex shaped rods that snap
| together.
| meigwilym wrote:
| > that could just bring this idea into existence from nothing but
| a bit of code and some basic principles of physics.
|
| You're putting yourself down here. But congrats on the proposal!
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| I'm wondering how feasible it would be to repurpose this code for
| a concentrated solar power setup.
| chilling wrote:
| Absolutely mesmerizing work!
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Cool! Makes a nice object to hang on the wall too!
|
| I wonder if there's any types of filament that could be used to
| print a mirror-like surface good enough to work ?
| milofeynman wrote:
| What happens if you point all the mirrors at the same spot? Fire?
| primitivesuave wrote:
| Archimedes famously used mirrors to burn a fleet invading
| Syracuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_glass
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Did you try sinking any ships with this?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_glass
| jcun4128 wrote:
| That's mad creative, like those solar clock things
| jmd42 wrote:
| This rocks, and congrats!
| mhb wrote:
| Did he say yes?
| jonas21 wrote:
| Bears a striking resemblance to the James Webb Space Telescope
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
| ttrbls wrote:
| https://bit.ly/3kvet7n
| azinman2 wrote:
| This is very cool. Perhaps I'll similarly do a writeup of my
| nerdy marriage trick -- I created custom 3D chocolate bars with
| our faces on them to hand out to guests. It required a ton of
| iteration and a lot of chocolate work (which is really hard!),
| but was really special in the end.
| akomtu wrote:
| This idea will have many unexpected applications. For example
| difficult to remove signs projected to flat surfaces.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| An application close to this idea: IKEA arrow signs projected
| on the floor.
|
| They need no painting, floor needs no protection or treatment
| and they won't disappear until the light is off.
| zestyping wrote:
| You can do that just with a mirror in the shape of an arrow.
| Or a mirror with a negative arrow painted on it :)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Yes. It's pretty interesting they went the "projector" way.
|
| I guess there is an issue of the arrow not being lit enough
| to stand out if the mirror flatly reflects ambient light,
| it would need to focus a lot more light, which would also
| make it much bigger.
|
| It might also be that the additional light from the arrow
| is just beneficial in that specific case.
| harvie wrote:
| This is future of the street art. Mount it using liquid nails to
| some place that is hard to access and point it somewhere where
| lots of people will see it during rush hour.
|
| Eg.: You can install it in such way that parliament building will
| get defaced every day during lunch hours by mounting on near
| building or tall lamp post. Or maybe put it on your own roof,
| that way nobody can remove it :-)
| thih9 wrote:
| > put it on your own roof, that way nobody can remove it
|
| I imagine you'd need a permission; just like you'd have to get
| one if you wanted to use a projector and project something onto
| parliament. (TINLA)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| One of my friends used to live across the street from a
| federal courthouse. He tried projecting a movie from his
| window onto a blank wall of the courthouse. Half an hour
| later several LEOs were at his door asking him "politely but
| firmly" to turn off the projector and to never do it again.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| like the idea but how much sun does london really get?
| hobofan wrote:
| Enough to allow a skyscraper to melt cars[0].
|
| [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23930675
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a bit of a special case though, at 50 suns or so it
| doesn't require much for that effect. Great demo for solar
| concentrators though!
| Toxygene wrote:
| Word of warning:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force#2007_Bo...
| sanj wrote:
| That piece was done by my (then) neighbor.
|
| It was a little unnerving to come home to a dozen black
| Suburban SUVs parked in front of my house.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What have you been up to that would lead to such an
| unnerving response? ;-)
| mellavora wrote:
| That's not the unnerving part (answer would be "probably
| nothing"). The unnerving part is convincing the people in
| the black SUVs that you actually haven't been doing
| anything suspicious. While they tear your house apart.
| And take all of your stuff. And have you handcuffed on
| the floor.
| Firerouge wrote:
| Wild, the police thought that the LED display, that had
| already been up for 4 weeks, might be a bomb, and then they
| somehow spent a million dollars handling the 'threat'.
|
| Wilder still, Turner bought off the police after for 2
| million dollars, and then censored the creators from
| releasing an episode critical of the Boston police response.
| anon9001 wrote:
| If you ask yourself where the money comes from, who gets to
| decides to spend it, and how much fun the police had
| playing with their toys, it all seems to make good sense.
| OJFord wrote:
| Main article link made a lot more sense to me, having never
| heard of it (or ATHF) before:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic
| alhirzel wrote:
| Reminds me of Mitsuba 2; see Caustic Design at about 3 mins into
| the first video:
| http://rgl.epfl.ch/publications/NimierDavidVicini2019Mitsuba...
| _Microft wrote:
| That's impressive. Here someone created a slab of glass that
| turns the caustics into a picture of his cat:
| https://mattferraro.dev/posts/caustics-engineering
|
| (discovered via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29063617
| )
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| 'two minute papers' has a link to a free course on how to do
| this. I haven't checked them out.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r-eIKkyAco Note: the title
| says 3d printing but it's actually milling acryllic sheets,
| not SLA
| jacquesm wrote:
| What an absolutely amazing piece of work, and even more
| incredible that it worked the first time. If I had to do
| something like that it would take me at least three tries to get
| it to work and quite possibly more than three. Math, 3D printing,
| love, what's not to like :)
|
| And congratulations!
| djmips wrote:
| 20 hours into printing the final mirror array frame he realized
| it was backwards and would have displayed "?EM YRRAM". So he
| had to scrap that and restart his print. So let's call that a
| try. ;-)
| codazoda wrote:
| Even simple stuff takes me multiple tries. I don't know how any
| engineer gets a design right the first time. I can build it in
| a 3D design app, look all around it, and STILL see something in
| the prototype that was not obvious in the design.
| alok-g wrote:
| I have gotten designs first-time right multiple times in my
| career, and in fact more often first-time right than not. And
| so for both hardware and software.
|
| For the last few years however I have gradually been loosing
| that and have started going easier on myself when I discover
| a mistake.
|
| The requirement to get it right in the first time is more
| stringent for integrated circuit designers (which I have been
| too) as cycle times are in months. It is true that several
| tools are set up around this to help find issues before
| designs are sent out for fabrication. However, the tools are
| not perfect, and considerable insights, eye for detail and
| perfectionism and are still required to make a design work in
| the first shot.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I just built something I _had_ to get right on the first try
| because messing it up would be more than a little dangerous.
| Endless fitting and testing and re-thinking before committing
| to building it. A little cheating was involved, I built a 1
| /17th scale test setup to ensure that all the electrical bits
| would work.
| stavros wrote:
| Does it?!
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, it works. Test rides three days ago, first real trip
| yesterday, 65 km there and back on a single charge.
| Write-up one of these days, have to collect all the
| material.
| stavros wrote:
| Excellent.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've never actually been scared of stuff I built before,
| that's a first (and that doesn't mean that I shouldn't
| have been scared with other projects, just that I wasn't
| either because I wasn't aware they were dangerous or
| simply too absorbed to stop and think about it).
| tomcam wrote:
| Wait what did you build?
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's up:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29198205
| tomcam wrote:
| Wow! Congratulations, you beast!
| jacquesm wrote:
| Very large battery pack for an e-bike. I'll do a write-up
| soon, still have to collect all the pictures and the
| text. It works incredibly well but it took way too long
| to make.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| Rides? Of what? What is this referring to?
|
| Some important information has been omitted from this
| thread.
| nynx wrote:
| Electric bike?
| jacquesm wrote:
| 2KWh+ battery pack in a very weird shape.
| nayuki wrote:
| Someone else's work that alters light transmission (instead of
| reflection): https://mattferraro.dev/posts/caustics-engineering
| mlatu wrote:
| That is so nice, thank you for sharing
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