Mechanical Iris V2 Update

It works! Well, most of the time. The miniature four-leaved iris that I designed was finally cut at the Saturday Thing. Despite the fact that somebody reserved the 120 watt epilog and didn't show up to use it, we got along just fine with the 60 watt. Also, it's been 8 hours since I was in the FabLab, and I still smell like burnt wood.

If only one could make a living by making random things that serve no purpose.

Notes for next time:

Make it bigger.
One of the reasons that the first iris worked so well is that it's parts were bigger (radius 10") so slight errors in the alignment of the pins affected the overall performance less. With the miniature iris, (radius 4") the best I could do for pins was an assortment of machine screws which leave quite a bit of wiggle room so the parts can misalign themselves and piss me off when I try to use it.

Find better quality wood.
I cut this out of 3/16" luan, which is synonymous with crappy plywood. Every piece of luan that I've come across has been slightly bowed. Laser cutters don't like it when materials are out of the beam's focus, and so in order to inform you of this fact, they leave large scorch marks on the top of your object, and the width of the cut increases greatly.

Make some sort of handle.
As impractical as this thing is, when I do decide to fool around with it, it's tough to hang on to and requires two sizable man-hands to operate smoothly.

Mechanical Iris V2

I should be studying for my calculus exam tomorrow, but instead I designed another mechanical iris. This one has four leaves and was designed from scratch. No help from the internet this time. On my first attempt to design this, I tried to make it have 6 leaves, which I soon discovered is really tricky. It would require more than three layers of parts and a significant chunk of time to design, so I ended up with four leaves.

If this works on the first try, I'll eat my shoe.

Mechanical Iris / More Dome Cutting

Today at the MIT Edgerton Center I cut about 50 more acrylic "dome" pieces for the outreach program. I designed this last summer in AutoCAD and the design is still being used for various programs.

After the 'business' portion of sitting by the lasercutter was done, I cut out a design that I found on thingiverse.com. It's a mechanical iris, that is, it tries to mimic the opening and closing of a natural eye. Unfortunately this design forms a star like shape when it opens because the leaves don't overlap. I aim to design one of my own with more than five (probably 12) thin leaves (material TBD) that will overlap and maintain a roughly circular shape when opening and closing.

Daniel operating the iris:

Update: Fooled around with the pieces a bit, found this alternate configuration: