I love seeing personal passion projects like this on HN - great inspiration for the day.
I’m curious as to what the build cost was for the whole rig, and on how long that project took. Seems like he milled a bunch of the aluminum jigs himself, which is pretty cool. Certainly a lot of effort and the results are quite neat. It would be interesting to see what more art pieces can be done now that the basic rig is setup - it would be really cool to “render” several-minute-long light painted videos now that it can be fully automated.
> It would be interesting to see what more art pieces can be done now that the basic rig is setup
At the end of the video he tears everything down and packages some stuff back up - I'm guessing he borrowed a lot of gear from the University.
According to the documentation[0]:
"Depending on who you are, building the machine and the control box is either the most or the least intimidating part of this. Since the hardware isn't too dissimilar to other CNC machines like 3D printers, I'm not going to go into too much detail. If you want to follow my design, consult the pictures."
> it would be really cool to “render” several-minute-long light painted videos now that it can be fully automated.
According to his comments in the YouTube video:
"Each of the animations I made took between 4 and 12 hours to shoot, one frame at a time. Each frame is 1-3 long exposure photographs of the machine performing the light painting."
Extrapolating from that, a several-minute-long video would take days or possibly even weeks!
How would someone without access to a milling machine go about making custom aluminum parts like these?
I've had a couple projects that would benefit from aluminum milled parts, but I haven't been able to figure out how to go about making 1 or 2 parts without spending hundreds on setup or tooling costs.
I’m curious as to what the build cost was for the whole rig, and on how long that project took. Seems like he milled a bunch of the aluminum jigs himself, which is pretty cool. Certainly a lot of effort and the results are quite neat. It would be interesting to see what more art pieces can be done now that the basic rig is setup - it would be really cool to “render” several-minute-long light painted videos now that it can be fully automated.