Project Logs

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• [A] Moving MVP status to gd0040

  kelvinA • 03/15/2023 at 09:44 • 0 comments

  I'm moving the Minimum Viable Product status to the newly renamed TwySize.

  https://hackaday.io/project/184228-tetent-twysize-gd0040/log/216746-at-rename-and-ergonomics

• [M] Implemented Tetrinsic Concept4

  kelvinA • 01/13/2023 at 03:16 • 2 comments

  [03:15]Me In The Past... I've done it. This is no alternate dimension. This new Tetrinsic design might actually have "all the benefits and none of the drawbacks", price and build time nonwithstanding. I've just had to increase the square to 92mm and move Thumb1 up 4mm.

  I think the top face is the most "modern chizelled" design yet. The cutout is because I intend to use the inside ball-chain side for the thumbs, meaning that the tip of the thumb needs space. Since this is the main face I see, this is a very good position to be in. I'm also experimenting with different colours:

  I think a grey would look the most calming without potentially clashing with a custom coloured Tetrinsic. I could get more exotic with the surface though, such as using an 8x8 LED matrix or a sparkly vinyl (see below). The OLED used in TimerSpy doesn't fit though. I also wonder if I should have both cutouts use the same material as it could improve consistency.

  Oh and I just got this idea for the cutout which I think looks better:

  The whole bottom of the cutout is on the same plane.

  Oh yeahhhhh... that's the professional concept render vibe right there. Now I just need to wait for the print to finish to find out if an ergonomic solution exists.

  [03:40] I just darkened the galvanised steel texture and I think it looks very nice applied to all cutouts:

  [05:45] I had to make the cutouts lighter. It just looked too dark and not calm-mindset inducing.

  Solution mining... ends, in 18 days.

• [M] Vertical Thumb1's

  kelvinA • 01/09/2023 at 14:54 • 0 comments

  I printed this concept where Thumb1 Tetrinsics are pointing straight up. Well not exactly straight up. There's an 18 degree slope difference between the normal of the top face and the top surface of the Tetrinsics. This is so that both of them could fit next to each other. 
  

  I think there's potential for this idea, but the active areas will need to be rotated; as you might be able to imagine, the thumbs push the TestCut forwards. The Tetrinsics also should be moved >10mm down and, from an aesthetic perspective, down enough so that the top face could be flat again.

  I think the current proposed Tetrinsic Gen 3X1 should be able to obtain Tetent solutions, and I've learned about the possible mounting strategies and intersection possibilities through generating these TestCut. Thus, I think I can pause solution mining for TestCut until I've got an actual Tetrinsic to use. After all, I like to avoid using seemingly unobtainium parts unless I can obtain them.

  Solution mining... ends, in 22 days.

• [T][M] Finger2 still collides with the motor

  kelvinA • 01/08/2023 at 19:34 • 0 comments

  I've moved everything right to the edge. Speaking of the edge, 3.3mm is barely enough space around the fingers and I've increased it to 4.5mm. 

  Somewhat suprisingly, I don't like the aerofoil motor cap design so I've reverted back to the cone. 

  I think that the reason why this Finger2 issue keeps reappearing is because my finger stops as soon as it barely touches it, making me feel like "I just need to move it back a tad". I tried the earlier prints and the motor bump is much more pronounced than when I first tried it.

  Unfortunately, if this concept tweak doesn't pass, the cuboid solution of TestCut will fail; I've squeezed out every last millimetre. I have a feeling it's going to fail anyway because Finger5's active area is a good 10mm out from the edge.

  Wait...
  

  If that's the case, I might as well save 3 hours of printing and 75g of filament and just call it a solution fail here. The problem actually seems to stem from Thumb1! Wow!! And I've been scrutinising Finger2 and 5 this entire time! If I use the joints midway up the thumb instead of the tips, the current solution that I printed... passes (ish; could still use that cutout space increase).

  A new solution... will have to be verified.
  Solution mining... ends, in 23 days.

• [M] Motor curves

  kelvinA • 01/08/2023 at 14:07 • 0 comments

  Great news! The 2 degree angle fails. I actually turned it the right way the first time, but I guess 4 degrees was too much. 0 was mostly fine though, so I'm just going to use that.

  NOUH FUSION!! Why do you only select visible components???

  The bad news is that Finger2 still collides with the motor. Hopefully now that I've moved the motor down (see last log), this problem should finally end.

  With the shorter protrusion, I'm thinking of having a different top cover design (on left).

  The main reason was to use it for the fingers, but it doesn't seem like my idea panned out as well as I'd hoped. Seems more like a design for the thumbs...

  actually actually it's not too bad...

  yeah yeah I can accept that art-deco like look

  yeaaaa the circles have more of an engine look, but it does look lighter.

  From the angle I actually see though, I think I've got something here:

  For the fingers tho, it starts to feel disorienting with multiple different straight line angles. I'll keep with the circles.

  I'll also get rid of the fillets closest to the motors (original on left, adjusted on right) because it looks more continuous.

  I think this is aesthetically acceptable. It's not as ice-cool as the "advanced looking metasurface chiselled into  a solid block" of the non-motor render, but it does get appreciably close.

• [M] Protrusionless alternate dimension

  kelvinA • 01/08/2023 at 12:47 • 0 comments

  I had to see what it would have been like if TestCut wasn't a (not-so-temporary) temporary Tetent and I bothered to hand-solder the screen wire so that I could mount the motors on the bottom side of the load cell. The render is as essence, modern and simplistic as I imagined.

  😭This cutout looks so beautiful and simplistic, unlike the cutout I did for Tetrinsic 1st Generation.

  In other news, the latest concept just finished printing at 2 degrees is very noticable, visually.

  I also found out this time-saving Fusion 360 feature called "Select By Name":

  But man that render makes me want to go into Tetrinsic and figure out a way to hide the motor or at least push it further into the main surface.

  Wait a second. that 20mm dimension doesn't go all the way to the top. What is this extra block here for then?

  Even accounting for the gap between the board and the magnet, there's plenty of space in 20mm! Ok I'll start fixing this.

• [M] Angles

  kelvinA • 01/08/2023 at 08:56 • 0 comments

  I've got the print and 90mm is a nice size alright, but as it turns out, I rotated the Tetrinsics in the opposite direction to what I needed because of Team Aesthetic. Oh and Finger2 still collides with the motor, so that has to be forcefully moved. The original cutout design wasn't going to work, and since Finger3 has the most travel (thus tolerance for movement), I moved it so that the Tetrinsics were colinear. 

  The sad thing is... imagine if the stars aligned and out of pure coincidence did everything line up:

  but ergonomics said:

  This is 4 degrees, but I'm feeling the concept-print-before-the-previous one and maybe it's even less than that. The solution is close to 0 degrees but isn't 0.

  2 degrees might not be too noticable. And it's not like keyboards or controllers are visually aligned either, nor will I see this side when actually typing. A counter point though is that an increased angle increases the likelyhood of a Finger2->motor collision.

• [E2][M] Tweaks

  kelvinA • 01/07/2023 at 20:53 • 0 comments

  First up, I want to say that the doorstop Tetrinsic shape unexpectedly helped out in this design. Thumb1 would've instersected Finger2 and Fingers2-4 would've intersected the same fingers on the other side if not for this design:

  The most notable change is that I've brought Finger2-4 closer to the East/West corner by 10mm, I've increased the height and that I've increased the distance between the edge of the Tetrinsic and the edge of the cutout by 3.3mm:

  I've also increased the main angle from 10 to 12 degrees and decreased the main square from 100 to 95mm. I think all those changes make the design look sleeker.

  It's just a shame those simple and basic tweaks took an hour to go from poping off the concept print to sending the next one right now. I was hoping I could have the next one sent in 10 minutes.

  Solution mining... ends, in 24 days.

  [8th Jan, 00:10] I just printed it and the Tetrinsics kind of feel like the angle is off and it might be why Finger2 is colliding with the motor bump. Other than that, it's all good! 

  Another cool thing I noticed is that, since both chain columns are exposed, there's essentially 2 different hand angles usable.

  [02:00] Top square is now 90mm and I think that's a good size so I'll stop miniaturising there. I've set the angle of Fingers2-5 to be half of the angle between the top and bottom edge of the face, thus it's 4.25 degrees. I've also slightly shortened Tetrinsic so that everything fit without conflicts.

• [M] Ben 10 Alienware

  kelvinA • 01/06/2023 at 20:54 • 0 comments

  I've brought in the Tetrinsic Gen 3X1 concept into TestCut. It's probably because of the green, but man this looks like some kind of alien tech, such as Sonic Frontiers' main bosses when they go into their second stage:

  The cuboid is also larger now; it's a 100mm square prism.

  Renders

  Yeah... maybe it's just too green.

  Looks more uniform.

  Black bars between Tetrinsics looks more uniform, but I'd be OK with either:

  Solution mining... ends, in 25 days.

• [P] TestCut's design language cascade

  kelvinA • 10/12/2022 at 21:16 • 0 comments

  So I printed the TestCut, and the SD card decided to disconnect for a split second, causing my DP2 to stop printing and home. Conviniently, this was just after the Tetrinsics for Finger5 were printed, and I was able to correct issues with the original design.

  For starters, 3 degrees was much too shallow, so it was increased to 18 degrees. Finger5 was also much too close to my lap / table surface. I hastily added those tweaks and printed out the second version to the right.

  Changes to TestCut

  The angle is now too steep so I'm going to try 14 degrees next. Finger5 is also too close to Finger4 so I moved that back to the same 20mm spacing as the other fingers. Finger3 was too deep in the trench, so the distance from the surface was brought up by 1.5mm.

  I'm going to sleep on the design and add any tweaks before I print out another version.

  Changes to a chunk of other projects

  You see... I quite like this marble/granite block shape, and if you noticed, I've also liked the look of tiles (see #SecSavr Sublime [gd0036] #SecSavr Skyrise [gd0092] and it's the reason behind the name #T^2 Tiles [gd0095]). When using TestCut, it just looks like a diamond square (a square rotated 45 degrees), which is much less mentally stimulating than my mouse and keyboard. It has the same vibe of what windows look like usually verses a freshy washed and polished one.

  Teti

  This got me thinking. If #Tetent Timespy [gd0136] embraced more of that cuboid design, I could fit a larger display. But then, with 2 crisp, angular designs, things like Tetent and #Teti [gd0022] were going to look out of place.

  So I tried deleting a few faces in Teti to see what solutions could be availabe.

  I kept going, deleting more faces. I'll make relevant logs in the relevant projects, but eventually I stopped experimenting and settled on this:

  Now this had a crisp, marble + copper look to it that reminded me of my earliest days in Minecraft 1.7 when I was designing a building with quartz (a white block) and dark oak (a dark brown wooden block), and I was like "oh noh... it's good looking with those crisp white edges and a hint of nostalgia!". 

  Tetent may need a redesign anyway if I determine that Finger5 is actually a good addition. I've said it many times before: I don't want to learn 2 layouts. This means I don't want to be switching what tasks the thumb is doing just because there isn't a Finger5 Tetrinsic in the design.

  SecSavr

  The thing is, I've also been imagining what an updated #SecSavr Suspense [gd0105] concept would look like the past month and a bit while I've been designing Tetent 'n' co. I was imagining it'll just look like a large, wide block... actually let me just model an image really quick.

  Ok this is what I was going to describe, but this isn't how it looked like in my mind because I never modelled it so I didn't realise that the 40x50cm panel I planned for the centre door was going to look uselessly small:

  The doors are like a dishwasher one. The aim is "consumer grade" so I thought this looked "boring" and consumer-appliance-like. Anyway, I had also decided to try the same strategy I used for Teti a year ago, which was to ask the question "If I was designing a product in a design firm, how would I design the look of it?"

  For the Suspense, that would be some sharp-edged marble box with black glass surfaces on the doors:

  Something that I could see in an architecture or art studio. This idea looks awfully like the new Teti design proposal.

  This look is also similar to the GUI ideas I've had floating in my head for things like #SecSavr Sol^2 [gd0045], and even my kelvinA logo has a bunch of 90 degree bends so it seems that Me In The Past was close to realising I should persue a new design language sooner or later.

  Other projects

  I've already started thinking of a new #TetInventory [gd0039] design, though I should probably leave ...

  Read more »

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