ArcAttack at Maker Faire (where I tend to encounter them) and elsewhere is always a treat, but this year at Maker Faire Bay Area, the addition of a hand-held tesla coil gun and Anouk Wipprecht‘s 3D-printed Faraday cage dress (and plasma ball shoulder piece) raised the bar for me.
Wipprecht has been sharing process and techniques recently, including this preview article at MAKE and this Instructable for this dress project — great opportunities to learn more about how this works, though creating your own tesla-coil dress and striker is unlikely (and highly discouraged!):
Last weekend during the MakerFaire2014 me and ArcAttack did something ELECTRIFYING, we created a wearable faraday cage dress! Hereby our process on how a collaboration like this got started! Enjoy. Muhahaha.
…First started by making a drawing of the ideal look (hard because it was a first time explicitly working with full metal as material) due to the hardness of the material I needed to be creative creating a structure that would be flexible and wearable.
Through 123D, we used Autodesk’s Maya to draw panels on top of the scan of the model using Quad Draw. An image plane with the artwork/concept was used for reference in the front view.From there we used 123D Make (app) to layout the 3D panels from Maya into flat into a 2D sheet. We managed to make any design changes, such as slight offsets for the panels for spacing, in AutoCAD. Due to the use of this software, the base dress only took one few days to complete from design to cutted piece, since a lot could be solved in software. Finally we had a 2D layout of all 94 panels, which we cut out of a sheet of metal using the waterjet at the machineshop of Pier 9. Martin, who is in charge of the Omax 60120 at the Autodesk workshop at Pier 9, was a great help here helping me out in getting everything setup and ready to go (these machine’s can be hard to handle).
Constructing the whole dress together with rings (over 600 rings) I think this process took the longest of all – we mainly did this in the ArcAttack workshop in Austin / Texas with the whole team while having a chat about how cool the end result would be (motivational talks – very important).
Creation of rings by pulling wire over a wooden stick and cutting them off with a powerful cutting tool….
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!