For our final project, we were instructed to make something cool using the machines in the innovation center. When coming up with ideas for things that would be reasonable to make, a shield fell into my description of cool. My plan was to 3D print all of the parts for the shield, laser cut and engrave acrylic to add to the sides to shine a light through, and use Arduino to control the light that gets shined through.
My project went in the way of having digital documents done first before making most of the physical objects with them. After the first two months I started 3D printing and didn't get done with that until the week the project was due. My laser part took about a month of on and off working on it to get all of the angles and lengths correct before cutting it out. The arduino part took about a week after my parts got shipped in.
Here are all of my inventor files for what got 3D printed.
Here is my illustrator file
Here is my arduino board
Here are my parts being printed off.
Here is my acrylic being cut out and me cutting it out.
Here's my parts printed off.
After I had all of my parts printed off, I needed them to be the same color. My solution was to spray paint them. I chose a metallic color because usually shields were made of metal and I wanted mine to fit that.
After I had all the parts painted, I needed to put them together. The best way to do that was to glue all the parts together.
Part of my shield was warped beyond salvaging, so to cover that up I cut and painted a piece of cardboard to cover that.
After the two halves were put together, I put the arduino and lights in one of the half of the shield.
With all of the parts fitting together, I glued all of the remaining parts together and got left with my end product of my shield.
What I learned from this project was how bad procrastination can really be. I waited far too long to do many things for this project and that lead to problems that I couldn't fix. Whether it was because of lack of time or lack of resources, there were many things that blew up in my face that I had to make a solution out of. I also learned about how important paying attention to many small details are. I also had a lot of problems that were a result of one small detail being off or not double checking everything. Overall, I made this project a much bigger headache for myself than it should have been. I loved doing this because it's the beauty of creating but the amount of mistakes I made made this way less fun of an experience than it should have been. I have no one to blame for that but myself. But, I still get to have a very cool product that I made myself. I love the idea of that and I think that this is all worth having my own cool product.