Time flies. This project extended into the beginning of term, and in a remarkable bit of synchronicity one of the term’s projects happened to be – learn a new skill and document your learnings! So after consulting with my prof, the amazing Dr Vicki Kelly, I shifted gears and incorporated this into my term project. This meant –
- documenting aspects of the project I hadn’t considered documenting
- putting the “tiny workshop” part on temporary hold; I would just have to continue to make do with improvised workspaces for the time being
- getting analytical about any bottlenecks in the process
I guess we’d all like to create perfect designs the first time out, but the design process for this was “iterative” – come up with an idea, test it out, make refinements, make a new version, lather rinse repeat. Unfortunately my process was hitting a fundamental practical bottleneck – each “iteration” took a massive amount of time. I had to book one of the slots at the MMC, make my way (since we’re a one-car family) up to SFU, put my design on to print for eight hours (meaning by the time it finished my slot would be long over and I’d be back at home) and make the journey up again the next day to pick up the print – and I wasn’t always free for two consecutive days to work on this, so pickup would wait for my next free day. Then I’d have to scrutinize and test and come up with a refinement, and most times this couldn’t really be done “on the spot”, and after that there’d be another pair of trips – one to print, one to pick up.
I think I only did this cycle once before I started thinking about simply buying my own 3D printer – so I did. On the recommendation of my instructor, it’s an Ender 3 V2; bare-bones but fundamentally solid and very expandable and tweakable, should I so desire. Within a few days of getting it up and running I was starting to get the hang of it.
That solved part of the “hardware resources” issue. Software needed to be solved as well: the school had computers with apps I’d need like Adobe Illustrator and Fusion 360, but their price tags were prohibitive. I soon discovered SFU students can access a free educational license for Fusion 360, but Adobe Illustrator was problematic. I finally settled on the open source Inkscape, which is powerful and comprehensive (if still a little unintuitive and “rough around the edges” on Mac OSX).
This is the most recent iteration.
