Summary

One of the projects I was looking to make some head way on during my artist in residency at Maker Media Labs is/was “Weft / Warp.” Last summer I produced a body of work called “Plotting Curves” the majority of which will be exhibited next week at The Compound Gallery in Oakland, CA. These 3D printed pieces are “hand colored” – I shaded in the filament prior to it hitting the hot end with a variety of dye and pigment based marker pens.

I am still impressed that the STL file for the Futaba motor and the Sharpie marker that I pulled off Thingiverse both fit perfectly when I assembled the device this morning. Thank you to txoof and beardicus for sharing the files. I did have to modify the 3d printed part with a soldering iron to move some plastic around on the filament guide and make a hole wider for the motor wire ends.
With “Warp/Weft” i should be able to dial in how much of X and Y is needed to produce A and B. From there i should be able to establish a framework to start thinking about how to make the device more responsive to other inputs and more complicated patterns. There was definitely a fair amount of friction on the filament produced by both the device and the kink going into the top of the machine, this is reflected in a few layers being less the perfect.

I’m honestly not sure that this will work as intended. The “bleed” of the color, and the manner in which the color changes from sharp hues to pastels suggests that getting any kind of detail is going to require a lot of precision, a really big print, or really dense marker pen. Either way i’m excited to have gotten this far. Later on I hope to write more a more complex program that lets the system draw basic shapes and patterns, then images. It would be great to integrate the STL file into this somehow and remove some of the guesswork.
I’m really grateful to Maker Media Lab interns Cameron, Eileen, Adam and Jose for helping me with the project and to Sam Brown for providing the moment of clarity needed to understand what was going wrong and why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLH2GXxwnaU