Silly Christmas Presents - 2020
Historically I’ve made some very stupid birthday/Christmas presents for my friends and this year was no exception. My present for Jared this year was without a doubt the biggest waste of time but it was funny and I’m looking forward to his reaction. Austin’s present was more meaningful but also quite silly and menial.
Jared - Beans
I have this random trend of giving Jared presents that say “Jared” and “Beans” including: a block of aluminum, a 3d-printed Bean, and a square yoyo. I decided to stick with the theme for this year. I was already sending him one of my titanium Inertial Boosts for his enjoyment but I decided to put it in an unpleasant box. I got the idea as I was scrolling through Instagram and saw a bottle of alcohol that was sealed in a box with threaded rods and many nuts keeping it shut.
Unfortunately this wasn’t interesting enough so I procrastinated a bit and kept thinking. Then I saw Mark Rober’s video where he made the glitter bomb porch pirate V3 video. He briefly skimmed over a mechanism he used to prevent the porch pirates from resealing his box but I realized it could be used for a puzzle box.
The mechanism works by having a piston that is spring loaded outward. It has a groove in it so that a pin can drop into the groove and prevent the piston from being pushed back.
Unfortunately time was not on my side. With Christmas closely approaching I designed around what I already had lying around.
I used TPU as a flexure to make my spring (shown in red), printed the pistons on my DLP printer for more precise diameters and a smoother sliding surface finish, and used random McMaster hardware I already had.
I printed a prototype of the mechanism, and an iteration later felt ready enough for the big print.
I opted to use 3 copies of the mechanism so that the trick wouldn’t be ruined if one of them malfunctioned. The 9 sided figure (nonagon) is a subtle joke referring to one of my favorite FRC teams, the Robowranglers.
The pins are not magnetic and no screws are exposed when the box is sealed so in order to open the box, Jared has to tip the box upside down and simultaneously press all 3 pistons in. Opening the box reveals his real gift, the titanium yoyo!
We’ll see what he thinks of it when he opens it.
Austin’s baby IPM
I made Austin a mini replica of the IPMs we used in Uppercut to kick butt this year. Austin is the man behind all the magic that makes our IPMs work well, aka the electronics and software.
I took a random 25mm spur gear motor I had and scaled the actual IPM CAD down 2.5/4.0 to make it reasonable. Printed on the outside of the gift are some random inside jokes. The gears are also scaled down Module 2.0 gears like we used. Fortunately brushed motors are a lot easier to spin so Austin just needs to apply a voltage to the two wires sticking out and his baby IPM replica will spin its output.
