For the past two weeks, I have been drafting and submitting my honors thesis proposal in order to formalize what I have been blogging about this semester! The proposal is titled “Automated Detection of 3D Printer Failures”.

Dear Reader, In accordance with my timeline, I have explored the capabilities of FreeCAD’s FEM Module along with other auxiliary modules in order to find a reliable software program that enables easy application and analysis of stress on a 3D object. I explored the basic functionality on a trivial yet essential structure as shown in […]

This week I have finally found success with our implementation of ROS and OpenNI on our Linux Mint machine in the Forensics Lab. I ended up resolving our global frame issue and have received images from the Asus Xtion Pro Live in addition to point clouds!

Dear Reader, The sphere packing software currently generates 3D internal structural meshes for hollow 3D objects. However, our current usage of sphere packing does not provide a major improvement over simple manual generation of uniform truss structures. The true advantage to using sphere packing is actually the ability to selectively manipulate local regions of the […]

As I mentioned in my previous update, I fixed the design for the Perko knots on the pegs, and made a decision on designing the Shrikhande graph so that it looked like the Rook’s graph. Well I sent them off to Shapeways and was overjoyed when I received them a week or so later: they were […]

This past week I have worked on installation ROS (Robot Operating System) on our desktop in the Ars Geometrica Lab in ISAT. With the ROS installation complete and usable, I began focusing on getting the OpenNI_launch and OpenNI_camera nodes working together to produce visuals from the Asus Xtion Pro Live.

This week I will exploring using the Asus Xtion Pro Live within the ROS environment. We have acquired a desktop machine for the Ars Geometrica Lab in ISAT that we have install Linux Mint on to use with ROS.

Dear Reader, This week we’re able to see some physical prints of the stl infills generated through the process described my last week’s post. The prints and pictures are all courtesy of Professor John Bowers. Here are photos of a print using the shell included: Thanks for tuning in this week. -Xiang

This week I have been setting up the ASUS Xtion Pro Live Stereo RGB camera to be used along with an open source SDK known as OpenNI for quick prototyping and 3D motion/depth sensing.