Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Custom iPhone Case

Last Friday I designed a case for my iPhone 4. My goals for this case are for it to be 3d printed to test for fit and functionality, and then machined from aluminum on the Haas CNC in the basement of the manufacturing building. We'll see if that happens...

Front
Left side
Glamour shot



The case adds about .05" to each side of the phone and squares off the corners. The pieces are held together by four #1-72 machine screws. Hopefully I'll find a tap for that size, but if I don't it's not the end of the world. I'll post updates when it gets made.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Donut/Torus Redesign and Upgrade

Back in September, I saw a design for a torus made of paper on the internet, and decided to take on the project. After four hours of meticulous cutting and fitting the pieces together, I came out with this. A neat feature that I discovered accidentally is that it folds flat!


Last week I was reminded of this project at Peter Mui's Fixit Clinic that was hosted by The Saturday Thing and decided to CAD the design up. Unfortunately my image-to-.dxf software didn't like the file I had for the paper torus, so I ended up making the shapes freehand in AutoCAD. This took about an hour, but time lost in design was made up in cutting time. I scaled the drawing up so the outside diameter of the torus became about 9 inches. The slots are designed for .093" acrylic, and luckily we had a big sheet on hand. To my pleasant surprise, I hadn't screwed anything up in the design and everything fit perfectly! After taking a few pictures of the clear creation, we shut off the lights in the lab, took some of the Aurora Bear bases, and lit it from below.