5/30/2015 Update

So it has been a while since i posted an update. There have been a few milestones and a couple setbacks.
i set a huge print to run for 7 days while i traveled to Seattle earlier this month. The printer jumped a tooth and the last few layers were skewed. so that was 7 days of printing lost.
I carved the huge piece into slices so if i had issues printing I wouldn't lose the entire part. After the first piece printed i noticed it was not square. Apparently when i reset the printer after the belt skip i didn't align things properly and everything was being skewed. I have all that sorted and we are making progress again.

The good news!
Alex has the code working and pulling data from the render farm to set the speed of the warp core.
Here is a video of it.
you can see the speed switch at 7 seconds in.
This functional sculpture now interacts with ThinkBox's Deadline render managing software!

Here is a fun function test of the RGB LEDs.

Some design updates.
we noticed that when the lights are animating and they pass through the spacers which are opaque we were getting a skip in the motion due to that area not having any LEDs. Alex wrote some code to simulate the delay that would be needed for the animation of the pixels to be smooth. The code worked, but not having lights in the spacers was causing some other issues visually. To remedy this i am going to hack up the spacer rings and print a part to adapt a ring of LEDs to shine into the opaque part. This explanation is very poor and i apologize. I may try to get a video of this issue this week sometime to explain why we decided to shine LEDs into the back of an opaque part.

I have also updated the design to embed a 5" touch screen to the back of the core's center. Photos of this work will follow soon.

5/9/2015 Update

I received this video today from the Pipeline TD at work, Alex Gorbunov. He has been developing the python code that is driving the LEDs. Since I only have 1 warp core wired up he needed a way to test without having the actual hardware since i am still working on it.

5/8/2015 update

I have a new time lapse of a coil part printing.
I have managed to damage the center 3 rings of LEDs and will be redesigning and rebuilding that over the next few days. Since the printer is the bottle neck I am not in a huge hurry. I have an issue to solve about how to fit the raspberry pi into this thing without occluding any of the lights in the central part of the warp core. I will post some screen grabs once i get the panel and other mounting pieces designed.

5/6/2015 update

Not much happening today. I had a lot of work today for my job and won't be doing much on the project. I test assembled the lower half of the warp core coils. I have less fitting to do than expected. I have some sanding to do to get everything to seat properly but it was close enough on the first test that it went together and most people probably wouldn't notice, but I would so I will be working on it.

5/5/2015 update

Not much to add here today.
I have been cutting threads on aluminium rods and polishing them to be very shiny.
I also recieved a new GoPro and did a time lapse test overnight.
I will capture the next part from start to finish, but this one was already going when i started recording. These coils take about 50 hours to print.

5/1/2015 update 2

Here is an additional video showing the basic functionality in place.

Whats left:

• the entire center of the core needs to be printed, (about 2 weeks of printing)
• 5 more of the translucent coils. (48 hours of printing each)
• 18 aluminium rods that need threads cut on each end and then polished (about 6 hours of labor)
• print the raspberry pi access panel (about 12 hours of printing)
• Print the windows for the central core (about 8 hours of printing)
• I need to design new clips to hold the LED strips on, the ones i made have a huge stress concentration flaw and they aren't working as springs like they should. (8 hours of printing)
• Fit, sand and paint everything (about 24 hours of labor)
• Another 16 hours of coding to make the code work with our render farm properly and add some fancy stuff with timing and brightness. 

5/1/2015 update

OK i have some videos to share.

the electronics are all finished
I still have many parts to print, then i will need to sand and paint them all, but we are getting close!