My own tinkering components
Tinkering for me is about freedom, the freedom of being able to make whatever I think of. So a must requirement for me during this assignment is that the ‘block’ that I am creating must allow the user to build anything. If the current set does not permit it, then it should at least be easy to use household items and connect them into the system.
Quickly after thinking about this requirement I thought back to a huisavond (a Dutch term for a weekly evening of activities with your housemates) where we built a bridge on the table using just spaghetti and marshmallows. By combining these two simple items we were able to build anything structural, using simple geometries the bridge actually was able to span a distance of almost 1.5 meters with a tiny support tower in the middle.
The issue that we mostly faced was that the spaghetti would break and the marshmallows would split or tear apart. In my prototype I want to improve this and make the sticks and the connection parts sturdier.
To give my idea more shape I started drawing out some ideas of how parts would connect together. Please excuse me for my not too terrible drawing skills :\
After refining my concepts into triangles I sketched out a simple connection prototype in Fusion360. This prototype however turned out to be way to small to connect bars together with any kind of strength.
So I redesigned the tetrahedron using parameters, allowing me to change the length of the outside and inside triangles easily to test out different modifications. THe first print did not go as smoothly as I had hoped but it still demonstrated that the design worked!
On the first prototype (left) the edges were still sharp and the points were not nice to touch. I tried out some different fillet values to see what would fit nicely and allow the bar to still slot in easily but fit in snugly.
After printing the prototype with different fillets, I found that a fillet of 2mm for the outside felt the best and an internal fillet of 1mm worked best to still snugly hold the connection bar.
