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

paulbupejr.com

31–40 of 138 posts

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

#31
post #25

Not 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

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to just create those gaps when you're specifically installing the fiber for sensing.

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

#33
post #30

Very 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 :)

Indeed! How do you know her?

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

#35

Paul, 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...

Oh yeah cable companies have long been able to do that - I wasn't trying to compete with or replace that technology. My work was soft robotics-focused with simplicity in mind.

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

#36

“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. :-)

Haha this made me laugh -- thanks!

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

#37

Paul, 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...

Yeah my thoughts exactly. OTDR is what the optical networking industry uses (for much larger runs of fiber) to find kinks/breaks.

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

#40
post #10
post #5

That's super cool and I hope you don't mind a little bit of unsolicited feedback but the first question everyone's asking is "what does it do?" At present the blog post starts out with two paragraphs talking about the format of the blog post and the applications but not what the sensor actually measures.

Good point -- I need to better explain what "bend localization" means on a more practical level pretty early on.

Also; if you can please include examples of practical use cases. I am sure there are tons, but I always love discovering complexity in hidden places
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