19 July, 1:00 PM, Making & Tinkering lab
Shawn, Hung, Xinhui, Kang Hao
As the deadlines drew closer, we decided to start drawing on the Rubik’s cube directly. However, we had to first recalibrate the Ender3 Printer to fit the position of the Rubik’s cube. Afterwards, we tried to test our drawing mechanism on the Rubik’s Cube but a successful drawing was not achieved and the quality of the drawing was not very good.
The difficulties we encountered are as follows:
- The cube was not stabilized during the drawing process due to the bearing it was placed above.
- Gaps in between the corners of the Rubik’s cube face interfered with the drawing.
We will have to think of a solution to solve the two issues on hand.
In the meantime, we found an open-sourced algorithm online that uses deep learning to convert an image to line art, which we hope to integrate with our drawing. For now, we hope to be able to draw an outline of the image on the Rubik’s cube and then colour it through dithering.
21 July, 1:00 PM, Making & Tinkering lab
Shawn, Hung, Xinhui, Kang Hao
The pully method was not working very well as it made the Rubik’s cube wobble during the drawing process. Hence, we decided to attach a pancake Nema 17 motor to the bottom of the Rubik’s cube holder instead, making it more stable while keeping it at a suitable height. We have also printed a base to hold the flipper, motor and Rubik’s cube holder in place.
As the process of converting an image to Gcode through Inkscape was not very intuitive, we plan to create an interface in the form of a web app to make it easier. Our web app, created using python with Flask, will take in image files and convert them to individual Gcode files at the backend.