My first print!

There are two things I want to start off with:

First, I want to thank Shapeways so much for awarding me the Shapeways Education Grant to work on this project. This allows me to order my models from Shapeways completely free of charge! Doing so has been very exciting, but I’ll get to that more later.

Second, Fusion 360 is awesome! It’s a program by Autodesk that is really nice for building good-looking objects, and morphing already existing objects. I’d recommend checking it out, because it has been incredibly fun for me to learn already, and I’m sure I haven’t even seen a hundredth of the things it can do.

To demonstrate Fusion 360, I’ll show you how to build up the sphere we made in Mathematica last time, in the middle of the homotopy, in video form HERE because I can’t embed videos onto my blog yet!

EDIT: Found out I can embed a video!

https://vid.me/e7J7

Now we have a model to see if the size and thickness we chose would be good for our project. But I wanted to be efficient, so I decided to make some posts intended to fit into the Zoetrope and print those on the inside of the sphere (I thought this would save money, but later learned it probably actually made it more expensive!). I did this quickly in TinkerCad, and sent it out to Shapeways to get printed…a few days later, I received my first Shapeways 3D-printed objects!

I was immensely excited, and immediately sent Laura the picture. The sphere looked like a good height, width, and thickness for the zoetrope, so we were very happy about that. But when we tried to test the posts on the zoetrope, we realized I had made a hilarious mistake! I forgot that in shrinking the ball to the correct size, I had also shrunk the posts inside! That is certainly something I will remember for next time.