Wow that's super cool! Very nice work
Thanks!
Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#22Not quite the same thing, but this reminds me of DAS using fiber optic cable for various acoustic sensing tasks--basically as an alternative to geophones/hydrophones. There have been a number of papers using transoceanic fibers for various monitoring tasks.
That is also used for various industrial applications, e.g. for strain sensing by Luna Innovations. I know that Schlumberger has various patents on fiber-optic sensing relating to towed streamers (e.g. for marine seismic acquisition.) But I haven't seen it used for soft robotics before.
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#23Solid job, and congratulations on doing something useful and hitting the program with the goal to make something tangible and getting out promptly.
Thanks -- I definitely relied heavily on my wife in order to maintain that pace.
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#24Paul, what an amazing project, this is what hacking is all about. Congratulations! Definitely try to explore the commercial side of your invention. It wouldn't hurt to talk to an IP lawyer, if you're still in Uni they usually have people there doing this and you can just go talk to them, free of charge (for you!). I'm generally against the idea of patents, mainly because of people who came to know to game the system…
My (former) school is actually already in the process of doing that! My dissertation committee thought it was novel enough that it needed some IP protection and encouraged me to pursue that.
Hey, that's great to hear.
Best of luck with everything!
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#25Not quite the same thing, but this reminds me of DAS using fiber optic cable for various acoustic sensing tasks--basically as an alternative to geophones/hydrophones. There have been a number of papers using transoceanic fibers for various monitoring tasks. That is also used for various industrial applications, e.g. for strain sensing by Luna Innovations. I know that Schlumberger has various patents on fiber-optic se…
Yeah initially doing literature review was a bit daunting because of all this existing work, especially FBG-type sensors, but this idea is so fundamentally simple that its been mostly bypassed by the smarter minds
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#26Congrats and if I may; your blog post should be how ph.d's are done - readable, understandable and devoid of techno mumbling.
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#27“I stuck a piece of plastic to my desk, it bent as I did it, I had time to investigate and skills to get a whole PhD out of that”
And this dear worker drones, is why schedule destroys quality :-)
Loving the write up. Clear and simple. Good luck with squishy robots. :-)
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#28This is really really cool, but why does it depend on TPU? Wouldn't it work with regular fiber optic? Or does it come down to economics?
It doesn't! I heavily used TPU to drive home the point that it can work with almost any light-transmitting fiber. I used PMMA optical fiber for the more fine demos.
That's great! Well done.
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#29Paul, what an amazing project, this is what hacking is all about. Congratulations! Definitely try to explore the commercial side of your invention. It wouldn't hurt to talk to an IP lawyer, if you're still in Uni they usually have people there doing this and you can just go talk to them, free of charge (for you!). I'm generally against the idea of patents, mainly because of people who came to know to game the system…
Maybe I'm not understanding the blog post so bear with me. Isn't what he is described what a time domain reflectometer does? [1]. I mean that's what it's used to detect breaks or kinks in fiber optics cables. The same tech is used to detect problems in civil infrastructure with embbeded fiber optics.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_time-domain_reflectome...
Re: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
#30Very beautiful research and thorough documentation.
I initially wanted to comment that this looks a lot like time-domain reflectometry on a conceptual level - but as Cindy Harnett seems to be your advisor, you probably know that already :)