Warp / Weft

thingiverse

One of my top priorities during my artist in residency at Maker Media Labs is tackling "Weft / Warp." Last summer, I created a body of work called "Plotting Curves," most of which will be showcased next week at The Compound Gallery in Oakland, CA. These 3D printed pieces are carefully hand-colored – I shaded the filament before it hit the hot end using a variety of dye and pigment-based marker pens. I'm still amazed that the STL file for the Futaba motor and Sharpie marker from Thingiverse both fit perfectly when I assembled the device this morning. I want to thank txoof and beardicus for sharing their files. To get everything working, I did have to modify the 3D printed part with a soldering iron to move some plastic around on the filament guide and make a hole wider for the motor wire ends. With "Warp/Weft," I should be able to dial in just the right amounts of X and Y to produce A and B. From there, I can establish a framework to start thinking about how to make the device more responsive to other inputs and more complex patterns. There was definitely a fair amount of friction on the filament produced by both the device and the kink going into the top of the machine, which is reflected in a few layers being less than perfect. I'm honestly not sure if this will work as intended. The "bleed" of the color and the way it changes from sharp hues to pastels suggests that getting any kind of detail is going to require a lot of precision, a really big print, or really dense marker pen. Either way, I'm excited to have gotten this far. Later on, I hope to write a more complex program that lets the system draw basic shapes and patterns, then images. It would be great to integrate the STL file into this somehow and remove some of the guesswork. I'm really grateful to Maker Media Lab interns Cameron, Eileen, Adam, and Jose for helping me with the project, as well as Sam Brown for providing the moment of clarity needed to understand what was going wrong and why.