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Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

paulbupejr.com

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Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

#51

Post by crote »

What an absolutely amazing idea, great work!

Your sensor data seems to have quite large "dead zones" - those should be trivially fixable by reducing the inter-sensor distance, right?

Would it be useful to sense the direction of the bend? I reckon this might be possible by dividing the tube like a Mercedes logo, and having three sets of the sensor in one outer tube.

Is there a way to sense multiple bends? With the current setup that'd result in invalid readings as you're essentially OR-ing the value. Are there any good solutions for this?

Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

#54

Post by maxnoe »

Very Cool!

Since you mentioned the visualization part, let me comment on my pet pieve:

The rainbow / jet color map should not be used for anything. It distorts your data and is not accessible for people with color vision deficiencies.

If you want to know more, have a look here: https://matplotlib.org/stable/users/explain/colors/colormaps... and this talk here: https://youtu.be/xAoljeRJ3lU

Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

#55

Post by 00702 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #52

Love the use of lower cost materials and nice jankier DIY SCIENCE. 00702, 4th photo caption appears to be missing the word gap. :)

Fixed -- thanks! And yes exactly! I had access to basically any piece of equipment I could want (including a cleanroom that can create ICs) but then basically no one would be able to recreate what I would make.

Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

#56

Post by itissid »

I recall first haring and reading about soft robot application from veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=058hRtaCWC0 I think you must have heard of it?

In the realm of rescuing or assisting people unreachable otherwise, could this bend and flex as much as those highly compliant robots?

Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

#59

Post by skoocda »

This is awesome! Presumably you can make this work with any interface that doesn't enforce the total internal reflectivity of a fiber optic cable, and therefore allows light to leak out. Instead of an air gap, have you tried experimenting with removing the cladding of the fiber optic cable, but keeping the core intact?

Alteratively, could you use a short segment of colored cladding that allows certain wavelengths to leak out more than others? I think that would allow you to encode each bend point as a different color-- which might require a different (more expensive) rx sensor, but could be useful for certain applications.

Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

#60

Post by jjk166 »

This is fantastic! One can easily imagine some minor refinements that would allow this to be mass producible with very high accuracy. And the applications are abundant. I imagine you could use space filling curves to make 2D or 3D sensors that could cost-efficiently give robots a sense of touch. Wrapped around something like a flexible tube you could make it directionally sensitive for proprioception. It's easily possible that other things that affect the air gaps like say temperature differences could be detected and localized as well.
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