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Treadwell got derailed a bit this year because of real life chaos, but I am still planning to build him. Here are a couple of minor rambling thoughts, since I haven't updated in awhile.
Over two years ago (back in post 20), I started working on resin casting lenses. I ultimately got a couple of decent parts but even those had obvious defects from various causes. To really improve, I would need one or both of a vacuum chamber and a pressure chamber, plus significant improvements to my mold making materials, polishing to a much higher level than I've done so far, and probably cast with better resin as well (clear resin is notorious for yellowing, and this certainly happened to my el cheapo polyurethane parts).
I could conceivably afford one or two of those things, but not several, so that's as far as I got.
Well, shortly before Dragon Con, I picked up an Elegoo Mars mSLA printer -- one of the new generation of (currently) sub $300 resin machines. I love the machine. It's far less fiddly than my FDM printer, and undoubtedly less prone to starting house fires as well. Since my FDM machine started acting up right before the convention, I've been using the Mars exclusively, mostly to prototype my upgraded magnet holder for my modded spin master BB unit.
I know some of you likely already have experience with resin printers. You'll know that even on the coarse 0.05mm layer height, prints often require little post processing to get a good surface (aside from supports). And you are undoubtedly aware that clear printing resins are a thing ... and end up much clearer than "clear" FDM filament.
I think you might see where I'm going with this... Yes, I just ordered some clear resin so I can experiment with printing Treadwell lenses directly. I'll have to be careful with the post processing, as IPA apparently causes more of a frosted look, so Simple Green or Mean Green may be better. We'll see...
Back in post #4, I mentioned wanting to add facial tracking to Treadwell to let it turn to look at people as it drove along, and linked to one of James Bruton's Ultron videos where he did something similar. At the time, James was using a Pixy camera board with the tracking built in. As I didn't have one of those, I started experimenting with OpenCV instead, and got pretty far with my experiments before a lack of an actual Droid and the corruption of my Raspbian install (where i was coding) put me back to square one.
In his most recent video, James has gone down the same OpenCV path for his performance robots. See around 11:20 timestamp. He is using DMX rather than direct servo control, but it's the same idea.
Finally, a bit of a digression here, but it sort of connects to this log, eventually...
As a giant fan of Halloween, I've been wanting to get my hands on some of the Disney Halloween themed Astromechs for awhile (R2-B00, R3-B0017, etc.), but since they are yearly park exclusives, they get harder to find after the fact... at least without paying inflated prices on ebay. I've seen people asking above $100 for the 2017 droid for example.
I got a bit fed up a few weeks ago, when I was unable to order R5-B0019 -- this year's Droid -- from the local Disney store or their web store, only five weeks after it was released and well before Halloween. (I have since gotten one, but at the time I hadn't.)
But I did end up getting a Black series Chopper. From there, I soon learned that while the black series is nominally 1/12 scale, their R2-D2 is undersized compared with the rest of the line. However, there are 1/12 Bandai droid models that were in the correct scale. That gave me the idea -- I could build a few of these Halloween droids in the larger scale using the model kits. They'd fit with Chopper and be more detailed than the figures. So I did exactly that with R2-B00, using the R2-D2 and R5-D4 kit.
![[Image: M4DKN0Kl.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/M4DKN0Kl.jpg)
I plan to also do 1/12 versions of R3-B0017 and R5-B0019 (R4-B0018 is decorated like candy corn; I'm not a big fan of that one). Just one problem: R3-B0017 is cast in translucent green glow-in-the-dark plastic.
So how does any of that relate to this log?
Well, you may recall that one of my lens casting experiments was adding highlighter dye to get UV reactive lenses for Treadwell (and BB-8). This sort of worked, but the dye is water based, and urethane doesn't like water. At all.
I did some research. As it happens, Glow-in-the-Dark printing resin IS a thing. It is called Liqcreate Hazard Glow.
It is unfortunately very expensive... Matterhackers carries it for $85 per 250 ml. (For comparison, a liter of my normal Siraya tech grey fast resin is $40. The same amount of the Liqcreate would cost almost $100 more than my printer did.)
I doubt I could ever afford to print a full sized Michael Baddeley R-series body with that stuff, even on that Peopoly phenom large format resin printer. But a 1/12 version with a R3 dome printed in mixed clear/GitD resin, or some Treadwell or BB unit lenses ... maybe.
The other relationship is that I'm now tempted to model and print a 1/12 treadwell. I know there was a resin kit released awhile back, but I don't think it's very easy to get.
Over two years ago (back in post 20), I started working on resin casting lenses. I ultimately got a couple of decent parts but even those had obvious defects from various causes. To really improve, I would need one or both of a vacuum chamber and a pressure chamber, plus significant improvements to my mold making materials, polishing to a much higher level than I've done so far, and probably cast with better resin as well (clear resin is notorious for yellowing, and this certainly happened to my el cheapo polyurethane parts).
I could conceivably afford one or two of those things, but not several, so that's as far as I got.
Well, shortly before Dragon Con, I picked up an Elegoo Mars mSLA printer -- one of the new generation of (currently) sub $300 resin machines. I love the machine. It's far less fiddly than my FDM printer, and undoubtedly less prone to starting house fires as well. Since my FDM machine started acting up right before the convention, I've been using the Mars exclusively, mostly to prototype my upgraded magnet holder for my modded spin master BB unit.
I know some of you likely already have experience with resin printers. You'll know that even on the coarse 0.05mm layer height, prints often require little post processing to get a good surface (aside from supports). And you are undoubtedly aware that clear printing resins are a thing ... and end up much clearer than "clear" FDM filament.
I think you might see where I'm going with this... Yes, I just ordered some clear resin so I can experiment with printing Treadwell lenses directly. I'll have to be careful with the post processing, as IPA apparently causes more of a frosted look, so Simple Green or Mean Green may be better. We'll see...
Back in post #4, I mentioned wanting to add facial tracking to Treadwell to let it turn to look at people as it drove along, and linked to one of James Bruton's Ultron videos where he did something similar. At the time, James was using a Pixy camera board with the tracking built in. As I didn't have one of those, I started experimenting with OpenCV instead, and got pretty far with my experiments before a lack of an actual Droid and the corruption of my Raspbian install (where i was coding) put me back to square one.
In his most recent video, James has gone down the same OpenCV path for his performance robots. See around 11:20 timestamp. He is using DMX rather than direct servo control, but it's the same idea.
Finally, a bit of a digression here, but it sort of connects to this log, eventually...
As a giant fan of Halloween, I've been wanting to get my hands on some of the Disney Halloween themed Astromechs for awhile (R2-B00, R3-B0017, etc.), but since they are yearly park exclusives, they get harder to find after the fact... at least without paying inflated prices on ebay. I've seen people asking above $100 for the 2017 droid for example.
I got a bit fed up a few weeks ago, when I was unable to order R5-B0019 -- this year's Droid -- from the local Disney store or their web store, only five weeks after it was released and well before Halloween. (I have since gotten one, but at the time I hadn't.)
But I did end up getting a Black series Chopper. From there, I soon learned that while the black series is nominally 1/12 scale, their R2-D2 is undersized compared with the rest of the line. However, there are 1/12 Bandai droid models that were in the correct scale. That gave me the idea -- I could build a few of these Halloween droids in the larger scale using the model kits. They'd fit with Chopper and be more detailed than the figures. So I did exactly that with R2-B00, using the R2-D2 and R5-D4 kit.
I plan to also do 1/12 versions of R3-B0017 and R5-B0019 (R4-B0018 is decorated like candy corn; I'm not a big fan of that one). Just one problem: R3-B0017 is cast in translucent green glow-in-the-dark plastic.
So how does any of that relate to this log?
Well, you may recall that one of my lens casting experiments was adding highlighter dye to get UV reactive lenses for Treadwell (and BB-8). This sort of worked, but the dye is water based, and urethane doesn't like water. At all.
I did some research. As it happens, Glow-in-the-Dark printing resin IS a thing. It is called Liqcreate Hazard Glow.
It is unfortunately very expensive... Matterhackers carries it for $85 per 250 ml. (For comparison, a liter of my normal Siraya tech grey fast resin is $40. The same amount of the Liqcreate would cost almost $100 more than my printer did.)
I doubt I could ever afford to print a full sized Michael Baddeley R-series body with that stuff, even on that Peopoly phenom large format resin printer. But a 1/12 version with a R3 dome printed in mixed clear/GitD resin, or some Treadwell or BB unit lenses ... maybe.
The other relationship is that I'm now tempted to model and print a 1/12 treadwell. I know there was a resin kit released awhile back, but I don't think it's very easy to get.