Changed jobs at first of December, and then we had planned to go back East for Christmas but our dog came down with pneumonia so we ended up being in town after all.
So, tried to make good use of that time. With the central mechanism in wired and in place finally started working on some play-field layout elements. I did a quick sketch in CAD and then transferred it to the playfields of just the top section.
Also, I’m trying out Fusion 360 as there is a direct plugin from that to the Shaper router thing once that shows up.
To mock this up using foam core and hot glue. This is surprisingly sturdy.. I tried to pull a piece up after gluing it down and took off the top veneer of the wood with me.
Anyways, I am suspecting the inner loop is going to be too weird of an angle and the ball is not going to travel smoothly along it. I had hoped to “play” this to try it out but one thing is clear already is that when you bend the foam core it gets creases in it.. which is already not a smooth surface. I’m going to look into this more.. maybe covering the walls with packing tape will smooth it out enough for the ball to move along the path.
The ramp has been eating away hours and hours. I did the foam core mockup, which was pretty useful.
But then it was trying to turn that into CAD so i can 3d print it where I got totally lost for a week and a half. Things with lots of curvature in multiple dimensions is not straightforward it seems. I had one approach (sweeps) that got me 95% there quickly, but impossible to bridge the last 5%. I had a different approach that fixed that 5% but then sucked after that. But, after starting over again and being more careful with the ‘sweep’ approach, I now have something that should be pretty close to the foam ramp.
However, experience with the central mechanism says i will probably need a few goes at this. I did print just the middle section of an earlier attempt which came out pretty good
Hoping this weekend to print out 1 full ramp, figure out what needs to be adjusted and if i’m super lucky print out a second one; but these prints take quite a while, so not holding out hope for the 2nd iteration.
Chronic Dabbler 